July 17, 2023
Demand Planning in today's world: a demand planner's perspective of retail
In this video, a demand planner shares their frustrations with the current demand planning process. He explains how they currently generate forecasts. He says that they start by making phone calls to ten different category management teams to collect new sales activity and promotion information. He then has to go to the merchandising shared folder to download information for their products, which is often in different formats. He said that it is difficult to tell what has changed from last month, and that the statistical forecast that their demand planning system generates does not take into account any sales actions that they are planning to take in the future.
The demand planner then explains how they put all of this information together in a custom spreadsheet. He then creates a PowerPoint summary for their boss on what has changed from the last cycle so that they can review and approve it. Once the forecast is approved, the demand planner has to scramble to load their spreadsheet back into their outdated planning system so that the supply chain teams can download it.
The demand planner then explains that the supply chain planners often ignore the forecast that they provide because they do not see any of the assumptions that the demand planner made in their plan. As a result, the supply chain planners create their own forecast. This leads to confusion and poor collaboration between the demand planning and supply chain teams.
The demand planner concludes by saying that there must be a better way to generate forecasts. He suggests using machine learning algorithms to incorporate leading indicators of demand into the forecasting process. He also suggests making the forecasting process more collaborative by giving all of the stakeholders access to the same data and insights.u003cbru003e
