Category Archives: Demand Planning

I’m often posed questions about the value and impact of demand planning to an organization.  Sometimes it comes from trying to measure the effectiveness of a Demand Planning team. For example, “What should my demand plan accuracy target be?  What is best-in-class?” Other times, it comes from trying to evaluate or justify additional investment inContinue reading “Demand Planning – Is there a return on investment?”

I was recently chatting with a colleague who is working on the integration of an acquisition.  He showed me a diagram of the acquired company’s monthly planning process to get my feedback.  It was a little unorthodox, to put it politely.  But that discussion was just one of several discussions on the topic of evaluatingContinue reading “One simple way to measure the effectiveness of your IBP / S&OP process”

Unlike forecast accuracy measures which have been used widely in practice for decades, Forecast Value Add (FVA) is not as common, but is a very helpful tool for guiding where and how we spend our time in the demand planning process. Forecast Value Add is a metric that evaluates the performance of various steps inContinue reading “Forecast Value Add – What is it?”

There are many ways to measure the characteristics of a Demand Plan. Its accuracy can be calculated in aggregate, in detail and mix. Accuracy measures can be computed at a variety of different offsets, and at various levels of detail. Demand Plan accuracy can also be compared against the accuracy of a purely statistical forecastContinue reading “Why should a CEO care about Demand Plan Bias?”

Take a minute to think about your favorite team sport. If you don’t have a favorite, as a Canadian I would suggest ice hockey, but the specific sport doesn’t really matter. What matters is that we think about what distinguishes the best teams from mediocre teams. Do the best teams have the most skilled players?Continue reading “Teamwork”

Planning demand for existing products already being sold is tough enough, where consumer and market behaviors are understood. Planning demand for new products is even more challenging given added complexities, such as: Timing the launch of new products Predicting market acceptance of those products Planning the phase out of existing products that the new productsContinue reading “Planning for New Products”

It’s a commonly shared best-practice that demand planning is a multiple-input process, through which different commercial perspectives should be considered to develop the best demand plan for the business. Having balanced discussions is not only important to ensure that the best decisions are being made. In my experience balanced discussions gives everyone a voice inContinue reading “Facilitating the Demand Review”

Particularly in the current climate of uncertainty and disruption, many organizations are struggling to look out beyond the next one or two months because most of their time is consumed dealing with issues and challenges that need to be resolved today.  This, however, isn’t a new phenomenon.  We all love heroes.  Fire fighting is aContinue reading “Planning and Execution – Planning the Sale and Selling the Plan”

Demand Planning organizations often spend most of their time on planning the products they sell to the customers that they sell them to.  That should not come as any great surprise, but to those of you spending most of your time in this space, I would invite you to step back out of the weedsContinue reading “Category Forecasting and Demand Planning”

A concept that I often find people struggle with is that while in the past, the total is always equal to the sum of the parts, in the future that isn’t always the best way to approach things.  When we look at sales history, the total sales volume is equal to the sum of theContinue reading “Top Down or Bottom Up?”