How to Overcome the Top 5 Challenges Demand Planners Face

1. Collecting information from various siloed teams

Creating a demand plan means consolidating information from multiple teams to get key information like sales activity or promotion information. The problem? Most of them have no vested interest in getting you accurate information on time. Collecting key information is a weekly ‘cat-herding’ exercise.

2. Making sense of differently formatted information

Collecting information from various cross-functional silos in your organization means collecting spreadsheets. Lots of spreadsheets, all formatted differently. How is anyone supposed to tell what’s changed from last month with all this differently-formatted, inconsistent information?

3. Creating the demand plan

Once you’ve painstakingly collected as much information as possible, you upload all of it into your demand planning system and create your plan. But once again—something doesn’t feel quite right. You worked your usual magic (which you don’t get enough credit for), but it’s like a piece of the puzzle is missing. Historical sales and demand data are useful, but it’s only creating a two-dimensional forecast. If only your well-honed planning skills could be enabled by real-time, leading indicators of demand to make a truly comprehensive forecast.

4. Getting teams to actually use it

Your plan was approved. Great! Now that you’ve created your forecast, it will be implemented and generate impressive results. We wish. It turns out the supply chain team didn’t even implement your plan because they couldn’t see or understand any of the assumptions you baked into it. In the end, they implemented their own plan because they don’t want to get stuck with excess inventory and get blamed for it.

5. Getting blamed for poor forecast accuracy

After all the work you put in, management isn’t happy with the forecast you created—again. The worst part is that they’re blaming you; as if you were solely responsible for excess inventory and poor on-shelf availability. When you raise issues to management about poor planning processes, all you hear back is some version of ‘Don’t Bring Me Problems, Bring Me Solutions’.

As you’ve undoubtedly realized, overcoming these challenges that you face on a day-to-day basis is going to take more than an ‘agile’ methodology and a whiteboard covered in post-it notes (not that we have anything against agile.)

Luckily, there is good news

The good news is that technology is quickly evolving how companies forecast demand. Advances in artificial-intelligence techniques and machine-learning algorithms are enabling platforms to take leading indicators of demand (e.g., weather, future sales activity, promotions) into account, and make forecasts much more accurate.

That’s exactly what we’ve been working on at o9—a platform enabled with AI-based techniques such as ML forecasting that will actually move the needle for you and your organization. It was designed to overcome the Top 5 challenges a Demand Planner faces by enabling truly streamlined demand planning processes, ML-powered forecasting that processes massive amounts of internal and external data (not just historical data), to deliver dramatically more accurate results.

This isn’t a ‘pie-in-the-sky’ idea. We’ve actually built it, and businesses are already reaping the rewards. It’s not just transforming how companies forecast demand; it’s transforming companies’ DNA from traditional to digital. Soon, demand planning the traditional way will be like printing directions on MapQuest before your road trip.