Business Operations for Which You Can Use Demand Planning Software

Demand planning software helps organizations to manage their supply chain more efficiently and effectively. It enables businesses to create a platform that brings down costs, improves productivity and increases cash flow. Moreover, it enables enterprises to respond to changes in the market more proactively and swiftly while taking on new rival companies with strength and intelligent demand supply strategies.

Demand planning software provides strategic value, increased visibility in the supply chain management process and helps grow your business operations to greater heights. The process of demand planning delivers effective inventory planning functionality and helps one to make financially sensible decisions by providing insights and analysis regarding the financial capabilities of the business.

It helps all enterprises – big or small – to strike the right balance between inventory investment and optimal customer service levels that result in efficient and profitable supply chain management. Demand planning software and management help an organization identify potential opportunities and improve decision making abilities.

The solutions also enable a firm to forecast new products by analyzing the demand pattern from similar products. You get specific tools help improve the inventory and demand planning by closely managing product phase-outs and phase-ins. This opportunity pipeline visibility helps a firm to effectively use its resources in the right direction and pursue goals that are achievable and lucrative.

Demand planning software shows all the sales forecasting data one needs for making smart business decisions. It further helps bring about inventory optimization and profits. It also provides the much-needed visibility to make quick decisions and present sales forecasting information in various formats.

The demand planning software helps strike a balance between demand and supply both in the short term and long term. It further allows a business to create a comprehensive and a practically feasible operating plan for organizational growth while also incorporating strategic business plans.

The ultimate aim is to meet customer demands and improve client servicing levels while maximizing ROI. This also helps a firm to identify various issues and encourage consistent cooperation among the departments, resulting in higher revenue growth of the overall business.

Omni Channel planning – Are You on The Right Track

I was talking to an Omni-channel executive at a major retailer and he shared an interesting story with me.

He and his daughter were driving in Midwest USA when they saw a truck next to them that read: “Anything, Anywhere, Anytime.” His daughter turned to him and asked, “Dad, isn’t that what you are trying to do at your company?”. He smiled and nodded, however, he didn’t have a good answer to her question. It got him thinking: If a trucking company is talking about this, how could traditional Omni-channel create a lasting differentiation for his or her company?. The executive took this experience back to his company and used it to drive a more holistic transformation that includes elements of Omni-Channel, but goes much further than a traditional Omni-Channel Initiative.

Is Omni-Channel the Silver Bullet?

Not really, but a superior Customer Experience is! It was the heart of retailing yesterday, even more relevant today and will remain at the core of retailing in future. How many retailers have a truly cross-function leader responsible for Customer Experience who is not the CEO?

Omni-channel is a key driver of Customer Experience. While having a person spearhead the Omni-channel initiative is important, creating a broader role to enable a winning Customer Experience is vital. The obvious question this raises is “why do we not see this role more frequently?” For one, Customer Experience touches every aspect of the organization which makes it difficult to define responsibility and accountability. It inevitably creates a matrix organization which is difficult to manage. But the value of re-purposing the existing role or creating a new role is huge to a retailers.

The discussion about Omni-channel or Customer Experience czar is important because it sets the tone for how an organization prioritizes and executes upon improvement initiatives. Today, these investments might be skewed towards Omni-channel without a full understanding of the overall Customer Experience, what is the benefit of each initiative, and how the various initiatives are being synchronized.

In summary, Omni-channel is important but it should be evaluated and synchronized in the broader context of Customer Experience. Organizationally, broadening the responsibility of a Omni-channel executive to total Customer Experience can be very beneficial to a retailer.