A lot of our customers at Well Principled have been struggling immensely with A reliable and granular view of demand is critical to planning for production, sales and marketing. It underpins all of your financial and operational plans. The problem is that you don’t just have one. Sales has created a view based on rate of sale by retailer, marketing has created a bottoms up view based on some assembled version based on conversion rates for your direct to customer channel. The problems start to arise when everyone is operating off a different plan and none of them have been subjected to the rigors of validation. It’s a giant cross functional game of poker in which no one wins.
Well Principled’s Intelligent Planning Suite creates a seat at a winning table for all those functions. Our approach uses well structured models based on the best business academics available made practical with an implementation that uses price & promotions, ad spend, retail channel, market, etc as well known supply constraints to accurately predict near term and long range demand. Unlike blackbox solutions, you’ll know your demand forecast results, how the drivers are influencing the forecast and reasonable actions to take to increase revenue and lower COGS.
Well Principled’s “Configure” application within the Intelligent Planning Suite allows the functions to create “What If” scenarios to inform discussion during planning. Functions can share their view of forecast to Demand Review in a process that both allows interaction and version control.
The “Adjust” application allows teams to collaborate and add their own expert input at any level of the forecast from Product level to individual SKU at a given store. KPI tracking on the baseline forecast and the adjustments helps to understand where bias has crept into adjustments. Its flexibility with accountability.
Ultimately at the conclusion of a planning cycle, this business benefits from aligning on one consensus forecast to drive operations and set the foundation for the next planning cycle. Well Principled’s Intelligent Planning workflow reinforces that discipline and exposes the forecast to all the consumers at the level of granularity they need.