Demand Management Process & Demantra’s Solution

Sensing Demand

Demand data should be collected from various possible sources and which can be treated as “BIBLE” for basing your forecast on. Not only actual sales data but other attributes of sales data like promotional causals, holidays, events etc. should be brought in, which justify the variations in demand data. E.g. Sales data collected from various Retailers’ store varies with days on which store is open, promotions which were launched at the store and competition activities near store’s location. So while predicting sales at these stores we should consider all these factors as well.

Demantra implementation offer real-time Demand sensing capabilities, collect demand data and information from various sources like sales orders, shipments, POS data, distribution center data, customer data and marketing data. Demand can be collected inside Demantra on daily or weekly basis as per the requirements.

Shaping Demand

There are items & locations for which sometime sales data is not available, in that case Demand Planners based on their instincts & experience should be able to enter or edit the sales history. Not only history of sales but forecast numbers generated by engine is likely to be edited to consider inputs which have not been captured by the Analytical Engine.

Oracle Demantra Demand Management provides user ability to define override series for each of collected series and also for forecast series. Demantra provides flexibility to create unlimited number of Causal Factors to capture the information which can describe the demand variance and events which occurred. Causal Factors are created and used to ensure that impacts of these factors are taken into consideration by Engine to generate the Forecast numbers.

Collaboration

For any organization the problem of keeping all the stakeholders who represent various verticals like Manufacturing, Marketing, Sales, Retailers, etc. is very common. Today most of the firms are into global markets and have operations and sales happening in various corners of world. Also to become a demand driven supply chain network, the need of having collaboration with all the demand nodes (e.g., customer’s stores) and supply nodes (e.g., raw material supplier’s factory) becomes vital for most of the industries.

The Demantra application provides an easy to use tool for collaborating with all the stake holders using a web based platform. Users can easily collaborate with their internal stakeholders & customers to better predict their forecast. Also all the stakeholders can be informed and kept in loop to reach to final Consensus Forecast number.

Alerts, Exceptions & Notifications

In most of industrial scenarios it becomes difficult to analyze and to figure out the issues like Demand plan crossing the budget limits, import data failures etc. Thus the automated notifications can assist the planners and managers to take up remedy actions. Alerts can be created within Demantra for notifying stakeholders and concerned group of users on Real-time basis. Automated workflows keep all the users notified and updated if there are any exceptions meeting defined conditions.