Good demand planning is a prerequisite for excellent performance
Using Forecast Fast, Planners can produce an improved and reliable demand forecast, the starting point for all the subsequent planning activities.
The demand planning process is essential to predict sales/demand volumes across products, markets, supply points e.g. Plants, Distribution Centres, Suppliers and time. The main business processes (purchasing, production and distribution) use these results as key input where the quality of the forecast has a direct and highly significant effect on all the main performance parameters of a company: profitability, customer service level, level of inventory, production costs, labour costs, distribution costs etc.
Choose a Plan
Forecast Fast is available in three different plans: Lite, Plus and Professional, all rapidly deployed, cloud-based and support multi-browser and multi-language environments.
Forecast Fast will fit with your business needs, whatever the size or sector, there is a plan to suit your requirements and budget and you can add more functionality as you need it.
All the key functionality of Lite, with the addition of:
All the key functionality of Lite and Plus, with the addition of:
Exception Based Planning
To support the efficient working of Forecasters and Planners the system provides on screen navigation to guide users to the key products and customers exceptions where forecast requires review or intervention. These exceptions are given colour coded using Red, Amber, Green (RAG) to indicate severity and are sorted to display the greatest exceptions at the top of the list. Select criteria are as follows:
Data Management
Simple upload facilities allow data to be loaded directly in the Master Data Management area of the system or via preformatted Excel sheets:
Classification
This supports the filtering functionality to allow users to focus on the most important products and to automate the selection of the best Forecasting algorithms:
Sales Cleaning
The historical data cleaning process allows adjustment of the raw sales data:
Forecast Accuracy
The following types of forecast accuracy are calculated automatically and displayed by the system by both value and percentage:
Event Planning
Events can also be considered as part of the Collaborative process e.g. Promotions, Contracts, one off Orders. These can be entered top down or bottom up and be associated to an “Event Type” and be given a status that determines if they are added to the forecast, or not.
Statistical Forecasting
Allows a simple application of sophisticated statistical demand forecasting techniques using the Cleaned Sales from the previous step as an input. The system has a library of different forecasting algorithms where different algorithms are suitable for different historical profiles. These profiles are identified by the “Forecast Type” functionality (see classification above) as follows:
Associated to each of these “Types” are several suitable algorithms. Each product has a forecast generated by each algorithm within the selected “Type” and the forecast with the “Best Fit” (least error with the sales) is automatically selected by the system. The user can override the algorithm and select another if required or the user can manually override the statistical forecast.
Collaborative Forecast Review
Numerous participants (e.g. area & product managers, marketing & sales managers, agents) hold information useful to defining a realistic demand plan. Their involvement in the definition of a shared plan increases the effectiveness of the plan itself.
The Collaborative Demand Planning element produces a simple yet effective process necessary to provide a shared demand plan. Each participant can adjust the forecast, filtered on markets/channels/ products or product families of interest. These adjustments can be done top down or bottom up and are displayed in different rows on screen so the statistical forecast is not lost, the changes are visible, and the different components of the final forecast can be clearly seen.
Changes can be noted with “Comments” and audit functionality keeps a record of when and by who the changes were made.
Scenario Planning
Allows the development of multiple forecasts with a side by side comparison view, therefore allowing the user to predict different possible business outcomes before selecting the preferred scenario to deploy to publish e.g. Optimistic, Pessimistic, Most Likely Case forecasts.
Replenishment
On completing or updating elements of the forecast the system calculates what supply is required in terms of stock levels and ordering. The key components of this are:
This requires the additional data feeds of current stock and open orders and for users to complete parameters e.g. lead Time, MOQ. The system outputs suggested orders to Excel.
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