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(Re)building a Consumer Driven Forecast with Nucleus Scenario Planner
Rapid pandemic growth of a household goods brand overwhelmed their supply team’s ability to keep up with the pace of change. They were unable to continuously rebuild their forecast to account for new store openings, new product launches, higher ad spend and eComm price changes, while also managing unforeseen supply constraints.
A new product category was brought to market by a Fortune 500 who tapped their best and brightest. The long lead times for key manufacturing components meant supply needed a 24 month forecast, so that is what they started building from a bottoms-up perspective on a spreadsheet, while the high performing sales team tried to stay ahead of their successes month on month. The Marketing team’s innovative experiments resulted in unexpectedly strong eComm sales that only lasted for short bursts, which they tracked with an MTA-based forecast.
High uncertainty and high stakes meant Sales, Marketing and Supply each produced their own forecast from the information most relevant and accessible to them. This frustrated Finance who couldn’t rely on the accuracy of any of these forecasts, as each lacked the interaction of price, promo, ad spend, and supply constraints. WP partnered with the brand’s new cross functional S&OP team using Nucleus to enable scenario planning for Marketing and Sales that adhered to the monthly re-plan cycle, while giving Supply a 24 month outlook and Finance an accurate, single version of the truth. Nucleus enabled every team to operate by integrating all their plans for distribution, products, ads, prices and supply constraints into an A.I. forecast that holistically accounted for demand drivers.
Integrated and Accurate Demand Planning
- Got to a single source of truth forecast in hours, instead of spending weeks realigning versions from sales, marketing and supply
- Increased accuracy by 70%p with the ability to forecast media spend changes by line item
- Cut costly expedited air freight costs by anticipating sales response to media and promo on a regional basis
Next Solution
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