1. Marketing and Sales

 

A forecast has to be trusted to build consensus. More importantly, forecasting software has to be intuitive for it to gain acceptance. Demand Foresight starts with a better baseline forecast and makes it easy for your organization to build consensus. With Demand Foresight’s solutions-based tools, everyone in your organization — including partners and suppliers — can see the forecast and easily update new information such as price changes, supply constraints, and promotions. The unique supply chain tools we offer for your marketing and sales planning include:

Constrained Planning
Constrained planning is the process of taking requirements from the Distribution Requirements Planning (DRP) process and smoothing them out to more efficiently utilize resources.

• Demand Foresight provides great flexibility in handling even the most complex mix of constraining factors.

• While other forecasting and demand planning software make planners enter massive amounts of control data in order to facilitate constrained planning, Demand Foresight derives the needed data from information already available via DRP and production scheduling.

Capacity to Promise
Demand Foresight offers a Capacity to Promise (CTP) module that allows you to manage orders promised given capacity constraints.

• CTP lets you easily base constraints on manufacturing, purchasing, shipping or all three, executed in automatic or interactive mode.

• In interactive mode, a graphic interface shows you all of your orders, capacity and forecasts as well as any potential bottlenecks. You can drill down from graphs to order details.

• In times of tight capacity, you can assign customer scores to determine which orders should be given priority. At the end of the promising run, the results are uploaded to your order management system.

Master Production Scheduling
Master Production Scheduling (MPS) takes the requirements for each product from DRP and assembles them into production schedules and purchasing plans for each location.

• MPS is fully scalable and quickly adaptable to dynamic business requirements.

• Demand Foresight keeps planners and schedulers focused on exceptions, where the real cost-saving opportunities exist. Rather than presenting a rigid listing of requirements with decisions already locked in, Demand Foresight allows planners to select the time horizon, work with top priorities, or review what’s changed since the last run.

• Our user friendly interface lets you easily drill down into sales history, item or customer profiles or trends, and manufacturing information with a single click.

Market Plan Tracker
Market Plan Tracker (MPT) provides the ability to set goals for the fiscal year by distribution team or sales point and you can set the volume goals by item and month combination.

• MPT shows you actual numbers from current and previous year as well as points of distribution and sales days in month.

• Set the Points of Distribution (POD), goals showing current and previous year actual POD. Management and team can set execution goals delineated by Feature, Display and Ads. POD and Execution can be set by any combination of Item and Item attributes.

Inventory Management
Demand Foresight’s inventory management process is uniquely effective at minimizing the negative impacts of forecast error. This may sound simple enough, but many current systems make it extremely difficult. With Demand Foresight, these opportunities, and the detail required to take advantage of them, float right to the top. Planners can respond more quickly and effectively to real market demand.

• One screen provides access to every conceivable bit of information on each item—inventories, sales forecasts, shipment history, trends by customer, open orders, point-of-sale data, item specs, customer specs, production schedules, deployment plans, sourcing, lead times and DRP detail—all just a click away. This exceptional visibility ensures informed decisions and lower costs.

Download the complete Demand Foresight Module Overview (PDF)

2. Inbound Logistics

Our technology grew out of a desire to design the best system for companies to forecast sales. Since existing historical and statistical-based systems contain an unacceptable margin of error, we designed a demand planning system that applies the latest advancements in artificial intelligence and neural networking.
Our unique value chain focuses on the raw and produced materials needed for your manufacturing process to ensure you are maximizing your purchasing power. Demand Foresight starts with a better baseline forecast that helps you appropriately increase or decrease your materials order to guarantee efficient operations.
Using Demand Foresight’s solutions, your company is guaranteed to decrease material acquisition costs and reduce average inventory. The supply chain tools we offer for your inbound logistics planning include:

Time-Phased Distribution Requirements Planning
While the sales forecast tells a company how much to expect in sales, Time-Phased Distribution Requirements Planning (DRP) highlights what, when, where and how much of each product is needed at each location in order to meet that forecast. In the real world, things don’t always go as planned. Products sell more than predicted, or less. Deliveries from suppliers are late. Production equipment breaks down. Demand Foresight’s edge in this area is the visibility our software offers.
Planners can quickly display in graphic detail the specific data and assumptions behind any requirement. This gives companies the tools to investigate and understand what is driving requirements to help them make mid-course corrections a computer might miss.

Material Requirements Planning
MRP is a very simple process. The computer should not make it more complex than it is, but surprisingly, many programs do. Demand Foresight makes MRP maintenance intuitive and fast.
For companies that produce products with component parts, Material Requirements Planning (MRP) breaks out requirements for those components. The full integration of modules in the Demand Foresight suite makes this information available instantly at other steps in the supply-chain process.
Download the complete Demand Foresight Module Overview

3. Operations

Efficiencies naturally lead to increased profits because they reduce waste and duplicative operations. Most demand planning software dictates to a company how it needs to process its business. Demand Foresight’s operations solutions are customizable to an individual company – allowing you to choose how you want to operate.

Using Demand Foresight solutions, your company is guaranteed to:
• Increase capacity
• Decrease work in process
• Reduce average inventory

The supply chain tools we offer to increase your operations efficiency include:

Finite Scheduling
Finite scheduling is the more detailed process of sequencing products on machines for production. Effective finite scheduling maximizes output given production capabilities and constraints. Because manufacturing personnel have their own priorities, any decision to interrupt an efficiently sequenced block of production to meet a customer-service priority must be supported with facts.
Demand Foresight makes all relevant information quickly available to ensure the best possible tradeoffs between service and cost.
Download the complete Demand Foresight Module Overview

4. Outbound Logistics

Once inventory has been sold, it needs to be shipped. The deployment planning capabilities of Demand Foresight tell you what you need to know to get the product moved from where it is produced to where it is sold. If you supply Demand Foresight with freight payment information as an input, it will help you calculate the rate and mix data for where you are spending your freight dollars. Using Demand Foresight solutions, your company is guaranteed to decrease freight cost.

The supply chain tools we offer to increase your outbound logistics efficiency include:

Deployment Planning
There are two sides to the replenishment process – production/purchasing and deployment. Most companies store and ship products from multiple locations. Deployment planning provides planners with the tools necessary to effectively move products from production facilities to shipping facilities.

Demand Foresight offers unique visibility in deployment planning, giving you the answer to key questions:
• Can I wait a day or two before making a shipment?
• What locations are selling closer to forecast and will need their shipment soonest?
• Can I supply locations from an alternate source?
• Do I have inventory at a different warehouse that is not selling as much as expected?

Demand Foresight can answer these questions immediately and help you make the most timely and profitable decisions.

Freight Reporting
For many companies, freight is one of the largest controllable expenses in the order fulfillment process. Demand Foresight offers an interactive reporting and inquiry tool that makes it easy for freight planners to identify issues and opportunities relative to freight expenditures.
Systems that rely solely on historical averages can often miss the mark. With Demand Foresight, you can see immediately what factors affect unexpected variances in shipping cost—rate changes, different mixes of weight or size, and changes in quantities going to different locations. This will help you understand the variables involved and make cost-saving decisions accordingly.
Download the complete Demand Foresight Module Overview

5. Service and Maintenance

Building a customer base means more than selling your product. Businesses succeed because of repeat customers, and most of us want to buy from companies that provide the very best in customer service.
Demand Foresight allows you to collect, store, and aggregate data so you can incorporate key metrics into the core areas affecting your customer relationships. Using POS tracking and sales analysis, Demand Foresight’s service and maintenance solutions can also provide data-supported recommendations on future purchases, show customers how much inventory they are carrying, create better forecasts, and model future promotions and events.

Using Demand Foresight solutions, your company is guaranteed to:

• Increase retail in-stock service levels or total service level
• Decrease lead times by customer or store
• Increase customer satisfaction

The supply check tools we offer to improve service and maintenance logistics include:

IPAM
IPAM is a pricing interface allowing you to create a pricing program for your customers from one to many. With IPAM, you can add various items for special pricing up to five levels based on quantity discounts. You can also adjust the back-end costs based on two different item classifications.
IPAM lets approvers sign off before the pricing program is active; this process can be set by item attribute as well as company department. Each IPAM can have one to many approvers, and once the IPAM is approved, the pricing is passed via nightly batch to the customer ERP system. IPAM also has the ability to renew previous IPAMs and generate pricing letters for the customer showing their pricing.

Intelligent Agents
Demand Foresight supports a custom language (FES) that incorporates fundamentals of a generic structured language such as C or C++ and combines built-in definitions and constructs. The result is an extremely powerful scripting language that leverages all of the data available to the Demand Foresight system (internal and external). The main purpose of FES is to write intelligent agents for Demand Foresight clients. Demand Foresight usually writes the agents using FES but the language is available to end users as well.
Building an intelligent agent is a three-step process. First, we write queries to get the information we need. Then, we write a simple FES program to execute the query and load the query results into a dialog. Finally, we wrap this whole process into an agent so that users have single click access to this new functionality.
The real power of Demand Foresight's intelligent agents is in the way it displays the results. We can easily fine-tune the fuzzy rules in our agent to adjust the relative weighting/relevance of the over-selling condition vs. the low supply condition. It is this capability that allows for truly intuitive and meaningful results.
Since Demand Foresight has detailed information about sales history, open orders, inventories, purchases, production, customers and items, POS and external information, the possibilities for intelligent agents are virtually endless.
Download the complete Demand Foresight Module Overview