Demand Sensing

Do you want to boost your sales over the next two to four weeks?

Demand sensing is the ability to detect, distinguish, and respond to the different demand fluctuations with as little latency and delay as possible. Demand sensing is the short term component that works in cooperation with demand shaping activities that together help drive accuracy in the overarching forecasting and planning process that serves as part of a company’s strategic S&OP process.

The value of demand sensing software is most easily measured in its contribution to boost sales in the next week or two, reduce stock outs, and reduce expediting costs.

Demand Foresight’s Demand Commander includes sensing software functionality that is designed to work with demand signals within the enterprise as well as external signals.

• Internal current demand signals include orders, shipments, capacity to promise, and other daily supply chain data.
• External demand signals include guidance from customer, channel data, downstream POS (including inventories), and unstructured data such as weather indices and promotional demand sensing inputs.

Demand Commander’s demand sensing software functionality allows companies to react to the current status of your supply operations and capacity by increasing the speed in which your professionals can understand short term demand trends. For example, given a specific amount of inventory and near-term production or delivery of new product — what is the best way to deploy our products to meet order fill rate targets, customer satisfaction requirements and volume, revenue and profitability milestones?

While lead times and industry standards vary, demand sensing typically focuses on a time horizon of no more than four weeks out and quite often the horizon is two weeks or less. Simply put, there is a time frame where supply is set – it really cannot change. So what is the best, most profitable way to deploy that supply? Demand Commander is designed to help you understand the demand trends and profitability parameters that help answer that question.

Along with advanced analytics and scenario analysis capabilities, Demand Commander also supports the ability to assess the effectiveness of product promotion and launch activities. These analytics are the beginning steps of integrating with demand shaping functionality.

Lastly, with the pattern recognition in place and the data pool of the sensing strategies and outcomes to pull from, Demand Commander allows the demand sensing scenarios to become modeling inputs into the tactical and strategic forecasting as well as S&OP activities.  This allows for a complete integration of short-term sensing activities, mid-term planning and optimization imperatives, and long term strategic planning initiatives.