SOLUTIONS 
Marketing & Sales
A forecast has to be trusted for it to build consensus. More importantly, forecasting software has to be intuitive for it to gain acceptance. Foresight Technologies starts with a better baseline forecast and makes it easy for your organization to build consensus. With 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.
Our Tactics for Marketing & Sales
The first step to achieve maximum profitability is to ensure your marketing and sales force is appropriately planning. Our first step in the value chain includes the following four tactics:
- 1. Forecast Accuracy
- a. 90% accurate vs. actual orders
- b. 50% increase accuracy vs. current
- 2. New Sales Revenue Growth
- a. 2% total increase over strategic plan
- b. 3% increase in operating margin per product line
- 3. Increased Revenue from Existing Customers
- a. 3% increase in total revenue
- b. 10% increase in promotional sales as a % of total sales by product line
- c. 3% increase in operating margin by product line
- 4. Development of One Forecast/Demand Planning Process
*Percentages represent the minimum you can expect when using the improved forecast.
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. Foresight provides great flexibility in handling even the most complex mix of constraining factors.
While our competitors make planners enter massive amounts of control data in order to facilitate constrained planning, Foresight derives the needed data from information already available via DRP and production scheduling.
Capacity to Promise
Foresight offers a Capacity to Promise (CTP) module that allows you to manage the promising of orders given capacity constraints. The constraints can be based on manufacturing, purchasing, shipping or all three.
This promising capability can be 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. As with all the Foresight modules, MPS is fully scalable and quickly adaptable to dynamic business requirements.
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, Foresight allows planners to select the time horizon, work with top priorities, or review what’s changed since the last run. With a click, they can drill down to see sales history, item or customer profiles or trends, and manufacturing information.
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. The MPT system shows you actual numbers from current and previous year as well as points of distribution and sales days in month. You can also set the Points of Distribution (POD), goals showing current and previous year actual POD. Management and team can set execution goals delineate by Feature, Display and Ad’s. POD and Execution can be set by any combination of Item and Item attributes.
Inventory Management
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 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 mouse-click away. This exceptional visibility ensures informed decisions and lower costs.
Download the complete Foresight Technologies Module Overview (PDF)