Demand Forecasting

Innovative Solutions for the New Marketplace

Are you looking forward or backward?

In today’s marketplace, customer demand is constantly changing. Forces like the growing influence of promotions and new items, multi-channel marketing, supply chain disruptions, and the impact of social media all play a part.

Continuous change isn’t all bad though. It comes with many challenges, but change also offers tremendous opportunities to wholesale and retail businesses. Companies that forecast by looking ahead have the greatest potential.

Stop Using Outdated Forecasting Methods

Unfortunately, for most companies their demand forecasting solutions are out of date. Older forecasting systems were designed to look backward, not forward. These systems may utilize simplified math or even spreadsheets for demand forecasting, which is a huge weakness.

Outdated forecasting systems have very poor or no analytics for identifying demand trends. They also track demand shaping events and baseline demand poorly. This causes low forecast accuracy and bad buying decisions that translate into customer service issues, higher product costs, and lost sales.

Respond to Changes in Demand Quicker

Herlitz Inventory Management’s HIMPACT tool takes an innovative approach to forecasting and demand planning.

 

Key Features of HIMPACT Demand Forecasting

We’ve incorporated a new methodology with daily analytics into demand forecasting and inventory replenishment. HIMPACT identifies daily exceptions and trends to enhance your buying decisions. This translates into greatly improved product flow and higher customer service.

HIMPACT is packed with many state-of-the-art features that improve the quality of forecasting and the flow of products to your locations. Our integrated design uses new techniques and analytics to automate and improve demand forecasting and inventory replenishment. This frees your buyers’ time, allowing them to focus on adding market intelligence to their buying decisions.

  • Segregates Regular Demand, Lost Sales, and Promotion Demand and properly identifies Lost Sales.
  • Daily forecasting of all products using new proprietary methods that greatly improve forecast accuracy.
  • Promotion demand is filtered by customer/store group, again increasing forecast accuracy.
  • Service and Lost Sales Analysis (SALSA) improves buyers’ insights into customer demand changes using actual sales order data. SALSA finds the root cause of lost sales and helps create better forecasts for future replenishment orders.
  • Seasonality within the week is updated automatically for each SKU/location, improving buying decisions on short shelf-life products and matching the flow of products to your weekly sales pattern.
  • Back-order tracking at the customer level eliminates the double and triple counting of lost sales.
  • Daily alerts on all key exceptions: forecasting, promotions, lead time, and service.
  • The algorithms built-in HIMPACT respond to changes in base-level demand forecasts. This provides planners with the ability to quickly adjust demand and inventory when needed, eliminating many service issues and lost sales.
  • Automated forecast updates eliminate the buyer’s heavy lifting. HIMPACT also automates the management of demand spikes, dips, and seasonal profiling.

HIMPACT’s innovative approach to demand forecasting produces significant improvements, such as:

  • Increased demand visibility
  • Lower forecast errors
  • Streamlined processes
  • New daily insights

These translate into improved performance in your supply chain execution, and a high level of service your customers expect.