Demand Planner
One Version of the Truth |
The discipline of establishing a reasoned, realistic, and routinely updated demand plan, is one of the most difficult supply chain tasks a manufacturing company must manage. The Zemeter Demand Manager allows demand planners to create and update statistical forecasts, plan for price changes and promotions, and analyze demand data, such as orders and shipments. Why an Accurate Forecast is Critical to planning |
Monitor Demand |
The Zemeter software also generates alerts and warnings when orders or shipments vary significantly from the forecast. The demand planner can easily compare the inputs of multiple collaborators to determine the best overall plan, as well as "freeze" a plan for later metrics calculations. |
Support Planners |
Equally important, the demand planner slices and dices the forecast, including aggregating and disaggregating by multiple criteria, making the challenging job of demand planning manageable. |
Feature |
What This Means to You |
Advanced Methods |
Baseline Forecasting provides more than twenty forecasting methods including the optimal (best fit) method for a given series. An expert system is available to analyze for sparse data, or other unusual characteristics. Better forecast accuracy has an immediate and positive impact on inventory required to support sales. |
Adaptive Collaboration |
Companies cannot put in place a collaborative forecasting process without the ability to effectively and intelligently combine inputs that come from different sources. Building on some innovative research pioneered at Cornell University, Zemeter includes a breakthrough method to optimize the process for combining different demand forecasts. These demand inputs include information statistically created by Zemeter, as well as information gathered on an exception basis through collaboration with users. It allows companies to consider the "economic significance" of including additional demand inputs from such sources as customers, sales representatives, and marketing. Collaborative Forecasting |
User Defined metrics |
Performance Reporting employs user-definable metrics to measure forecast performance (or user inputs) against actual sales, both from a current month and a historical perspective. |
Aggregation and Disaggregation |
Quickly identify the best level of detail at which to forecast, then automatically allow aggregation or disaggregation to levels that are most meaningful for different business functions. |
Comprehensive Functionality |
Enhances a planner's ability to identify and forecast for events including sales promotions and other one-time occurrences that are not picked up in a statistical forecast. Zemeter software tracks any special event and adjusts forecasts according to user specified business rules.
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