Imagine you are a marketing manager who has done everything in your power to help develop and promote a product—and it’s selling well. But now your company is running short of the product because the demand forecasts for it were too low. Recall that this is the scenario Nintendo faced when the Wii first came out. The same thing happened to IBM when it launched the popular ThinkPad laptop in 1992.
Not only is the product shortage going to adversely affect the profitably of your company, but it’s going to adversely affect you, too. Why? Because you, as a marketing manager, probably earn either a bonus or commission from the products you work to promote, depending on how well they sell. And, of course, you can’t sell what you don’t have.
As you can probably tell, the best marketing decisions and supplier selections aren’t enough if your company’s demand forecasts are wrong. Demand planning is the process of estimating how much of a good or service customers will buy from you. If you’re a producer of a product, this will affect not only the amount of goods and services you have to produce but also the materials you must purchase to make them. It will also affect your production scheduling, or the management of the resources, events, and processes need to create an offering. For example, if demand is heavy, you might need your staff members to work overtime. Closely related to demand forecasting are lead times. A product’s lead time is the amount of time it takes for a customer to receive a good or service once it’s been ordered. Lead times also have to be taken into account when a company is forecasting demand.
Sourcing decisions—deciding which suppliers to use—are generally made periodically. Forecasting decisions must be made more frequently—sometimes daily. One way for you to predict the demand for your product is to look at your company’s past sales. This is what most companies do. But they don’t stop there. Why? Because changes in many factors—the availability of materials to produce a product and their prices, global competition, oil prices (which affect shipping costs), the economy, and even the weather—can change the picture.
For example, when the economy hit the skids in 2008, the demand for many products fell. So if you had based your production, sales, and marketing forecasts on 2007 data alone, chances are your forecasts would have been wildly wrong. Do you remember when peanut butter was recalled in 2009 because of contamination? If your firm were part of the supply chain for peanut butter products, you would have needed to quickly change your forecasts.
The promotions you run will also affect demand for your products. Consider what happened to KFC when it first came out with its new grilled chicken product. As part of the promotion, KFC gave away coupons for free grilled chicken via Oprah.com. Just twenty-four hours after the coupons were uploaded to the Web site, KFC risked running out of chicken. Many customers were turned away. Others were given “rain checks” (certificates) they could use to get free grilled chicken later. 1
In addition to looking at the sales histories of their firms, supply chain managers also consult with marketing managers and sales executives when they are generating demand forecasts. Sales and marketing personnel know what promotions are being planned because they work more closely with customers and know what customers’ needs are and if those needs are changing.
Firms also look to their supply chain partners to help with their demand planning.
Collaborative planning, forecasting, and replenishment (CPFR) is a practice whereby supply chain partners share information and coordinate their operations. Walmart has developed a Web-based CPFR system called Retail Link. Retailers can log into Retail Link to see how well their products are selling at various Walmart stores, how soon more products need to be shipped to the company and where, how any promotions being run are affecting the profitability of their products, and so forth. Because different companies often use different information technology systems and software, Web-based tools like Retail Link are becoming a popular way for supply chain partners to interface with one another.
Not all firms are wild about sharing every piece of information they can with their supply chains partners. Some retailers view their sales information as an asset—something they can sell to information companies like Information Resources, Inc., which provides competitive data to firms that willing to pay for it. 2 By contrast, other firms go so far as to involve their suppliers before even producing a product so they can suggest design changes, material choices, and production recommendations.
The trend is clearly toward more shared information, or what businesspeople refer to as supply chain visibility. After all, it makes sense that a supplier will be not only more reliable but also in a better position to add value to your products if it knows what your sales, operations, and marketing plans are—and what your customers want. By sharing more than just basic transaction information, companies can see how well operations are proceeding, how products are flowing through the chain, how well the partners are performing and cooperating with one another, and the extent to which value is being built in to the product.
Demand-planning software can also be used to create more accurate demand forecasts. Demand-planning software can synthesize a variety of factors to better predict a firm’s demand—for example, the firm’s sales history, point-of-sale data, warehouse, suppliers, and promotion information, and economic and competitive trends. So a company’s demand forecasts are as up-to-date as possible, some of the systems allow sales and marketing personnel to input purchasing information into their mobile devices after consulting with customers.
Litehouse Foods, a salad dressing manufacturer, was able to improve its forecasts dramatically by using demand-planning software. Originally the company was using a traditional sales database and spreadsheets to do the work. “It was all pretty much manual calculations. We had no engine to do the heavy lifting for us,” says John Shaw, the company’s Information Technology director. In a short time, the company was able to reduce its inventory by about one-third while still meeting its customers’ needs. 3
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