WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES?
The main challenges regarding the supply chain management are evolving from inadequate planning tools which are incapable of handling exceptions or floating seasonal events. The users are expected to understand and explore the solutions by themselves which results in a naïve operation of the forecasting tools and sub-optimal results. Apart from that, those immature tools fail to take specific business objectives into consideration and are inept to pay attention to cannibalization and life cycles. Planners are expected to control, judge and alter automatic forecasting by relying merely on their experience. Inaccurate forecasting forces planners to invest an unnecessary amount of time sorting stable items from those that require human attention. The quality of the forecast has a direct impact on all aspects of business operations, such as the supply, - and distribution chains, ‘hands on’ financial control and inventory management.
ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY
ForecastPlanner™
ForecastPlanner™ provides a unique approach to combine business knowledge with the automatic forecast including the handling of events and promotions.
ForecastPlanner™
Events and Promotions
ForecastPlanner™ allows users to connect seemingly "one off" events into a cluster of events with predictive behavior and to model "floating seasonality". These events are automatically filtered out, forecasted separately and recombined with the baseline data at the appropriate places. ForecastPlanner™ is capable of producing a baseline as well as merely event based forecasting.
ForecastPlanner™
Decentralized Businesses
Multinational corporations need to apply a centralized DP process into several locations. That requires a uniform solution across the different markets and business units although they widely differ in various aspects. Adopting the DP model to
each of them is an expensive task.
ForecastPlanner™ provides an easy, cost efficient way to provide re-tuning and maintenance of the DP process. It enables the export of market characteristics, sales, and forecasting and identifies stable DP methods that will adopt it to the market.
ForecastPlanner™
Exception Stabilizer
A key component of ForecastPlanner™ is the Stabilizer. Many Demand Planning system are incapable of controlling the accuracy of the forecasting quality over time because systems, that are merely predicting a flat demand will inevitably fail during changes of seasons. The aim of our STABILIZER is to identify and deploy only the DP models that will produce good results over time.
ForecastPlanner™
Full Scalability
ForecastPlanner™ is capable of running highly complicated structures with millions of combinations. The scale-up complexity is almost linear in the number of nodes and does not explode with the growth of the client. A full optimization and forecast run of a client with around 10K nodes runs at about 4 minutes on a standard office workstation.
ForecastPlanner™
FEATURES
The leading, most accurate forecasting solution for Demand Planning Business Intelligence.
Maximize the efficiency of your promotions with our innovative promotion & exception toolbox.
Accurate and Efficient Forecasting is the key
to competitiveness
and a primary metric
for the organization's Health and Wealth.
ForecastPlanner™ Integration
The specially designed Affix version of ForecastPlanner™, enhances and optimizes the forecasts within other forecasting systems and can be operated in a batch mode under existing
Demand Planning systems and forecasting modules.
ForecastPlanner™
and other systems
ForecastPlanner™ input can be a table view, an Excel™ or csv file containing the data in its raw format. An XML template controlling the data interpretation allows a hands-off operation. The execution of the session includes forecasts and smart optimizations that detect the best forecast models and algorithms for the targeted business scenario. The results are sent to the hosting system and are also available via the web site analysis screen. The configurations and results can be exported to the user's desktop as an Excel analysis cube and report.
MODELS & SYSTEMS
FORECAST MODELS
1. ForecastPlanner Forecasts:
Optimization, forecasting, and business intelligence are done in ForecastPlanner and fed to any internal organization IT system.
2. ForecastPlanner Optimization:
Optimization and business intelligence are done in ForecastPlanner and fed to SAP’s APO and BW.
Forecasting is done inside APO using APO forecasting tools, specialized macros, and settings, based on ForecastPlanner smart analysis.
INTEGRATION SYSTEMS
1. Automatic system:
produces full forecast using a complete model.
2. Semi-automatic system:
produces mostly baseline forecasting. Human intervention are required to complement the forecast with extra data, such as promotional lifts and cannibalization effects.
3. Toolbox system:
provides planners, analysts and managers tools that provides relevant data for marketing and statistical forecast applications.
Our unique Elasticity BI reports reveals the optimal level of discount for each item [ lowest price reduction, for the best sales level].
*According to specific business needs, all of those 3 systems can be maintained simultaneously.
ForecastPlanner™
and SAP™
ForecastPlanner™ enhances and optimizes the forecasts within both SAP APO and SAP ERP forecasting components. It functions as central forecasting hub that can service many of the SAP modules, especially APO DP. Master data and time based data is received directly from the SAP infrastructure and the aggregation/disaggregation according
to time or other characteristic can be automatically executed. Thus, a hierarchical forecast is possible even in places that do not support it naturally (e.g. MRP).