Demand Planning
Create a demand plan that improves performance across your whole value chain. Keep customers happy, reduce costs and increase revenue and profit.
We understand your challenges
Poor customer service levels
You’re spending too much on maintaining good service levels.
You’re limited by an Excel spreadsheet
Your supply chain is being run on complicated Excel spreadsheets owned by one user that can be hard to use and collaborate on.
You can’t get market intelligence
You’re not utilising market intelligence to make better demand planning decisions in your own business.
Forecasting for different scenarios is complicated
You can’t easily compare forecasts, so it’s hard to see the effect of different scenarios on the business and therefore make informed planning decisions.
Over or under making
You made too many products or experienced product stock-outs because of inaccurate forecasting.
Forecasting new products with no history is difficult
Product life cycles are getting shorter and when new products are launched they sell in a particular pattern and volume, and that changes when they bed in. It is very dynamic, particularly in the early days of sales.
Collaborate To Simplify Complex Planning Tasks
Statistical Forecasting
The easy way to create sophisticated forecasts
- Apply complex statistical demand forecasting techniques using best practice algorithms at the click of a button
- Machine Learning / AI analyses historical sales, forecast parameters, and user adjustments to give insights on how to improve your future forecasts
- Automatic reporting of accuracy, bias and stability
- Improve the forecast accuracy by SKU at the lead time fence
Collaborative Demand Planning
Build a more accurate, effective demand plan
- Use sofco’s Demand Planning software to create the most effective plan with input from across your different business functions and external partners
- Give ownership to different people for their section of the plan. Filter by area, markets, channels, products, product families and more
- Consolidate your plan and share it within the S&OP cycle for review and approval
Scenario Planning
Simplify complicated scenarios
- Get the visibility you need to choose the most appropriate forecast
- Develop optimistic, pessimistic and most likely case forecasts and compare them side by side
- Create graphics and simulations to show the performance of different demand plans
Promotion Planning
Boost the profits on promotions
- Use your previous promotions to predict the potential impact of your planned promotions on volumes, turnover and margin objectives
- Consider all aspects of the promotion e.g. trade spend, redemption rates, etc
- View actual performance versus planned for effective, informed in-flight promotion management
- Evaluate the success of any promotion, using your original plan versus actual results
Replenishment Planning
Right stock, right place, right time
- Know when and how much to deliver to your point of sale and distribution centre locations
- Plan inventory levels in terms of volume and coverage of demand
- Automatically generate suggested plans for release to transactional systems, and create purchase / distribution orders that respect planning rules
- Project future stock outs, and see target, safety and max stock violations using clear exception dashboards
Sales Budgeting
Produce better sales budgets
- Achieve better results by breaking down silos and working on your sales budgets as a team in a single system
- Define your sales budgets against macro business sales objectives for real impact
- Aggregate your detailed bottom up forecasts for comparison with your budgets
- Manage multiple budget versions
WSSI / MSSI
Maintain the flexibility in going after opportunities as they arise
- View the sales plan at a weekly level
- Ensure an even allocation of products based on projected sales against stock
- Analyse OTB by Channel or any combination as you adapt to needs of the season
Merchandise Planning
Target Margins and Product Mix
- Co-ordinate different departments and perspectives
- Maximise sales opportunities and minimise losses from excessive markdowns and out of stocks
- Place the right product in the right store at the right time
Allocation Planning
Create an effective distribution plan
- Execute the plan, adjust for trends, re-allocate in line with constraints and capacities
- Optimise the ‘push’ to store
- Build inventory for peaks or promotions or clear to maximise margins
Case Studies
Hempel: Improving Forecast Accuracy
To improve forecast accuracy Hempel implements sofco’s Demand Planning and S&OP solutions for their global teams.
Trusted by our clients
“Greencore is involved in multiple categories, supplying a diverse range of products with different characteristics that require very different manufacturing processes. We selected sofco as they have an End-to-End planning and execution system that can be configured easily to fit these disparate demands. Our approach is much more sophisticated and collaborative now.”
Chris Chestney
IT Business Partner, Greencore
“What impressed us most about the sofco people was they understood our business, listened, and would bring a lot of experience to the project. They brought solid solutions to the issues we presented them with. It was clear from the outset that we were going to be able to work well together as a team and deliver this project. That is exactly what has happened.”
Barbara Van den Berg
Project Manager, Van Geloven
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