“With Demand Solutions we have been able to get our planning in place and implement national forecasting for the first time. Our forecasting has improved 12 percent and we are seeing steady improvement in case fill rates over the last five months since implementation,” Chris Provost, Logistics Director Arla Foods   ADDITIONAL FEATURES: Graphs help you spot trends, pinpoint exceptions and examine the forecast against the all-important perspective of history The Service Level Optimizer is a unique and very innovative tool that helps you objectively calculate and evaluate the impact of different Safety Stock strategies A Notepad enables forecasters to document and communicate assumptions and decisions in time-and-date-stamped notes. Budgets and Latest Estimates – develop, manage and track your progress Dozens of Filters and limitless User-Defined Ranges to help you manage by exception Customer and sales-force generated forecasts

Finally, forecasts that make sense

At Demand Solutions we have a bias towards simplicity and common sense in everything we do – including how Demand Solutions generates its forecasts. We have worked with more than 1,500 companies in 70 countries to refine an approach to forecasting based on logical, understandable and highly effective forecasting formulas.

DS automatically selects the best of its 20 formulas for each of your items – based on a “best fit” simulation of how well each formula was able to predict the item’s known demand.

With understandable (and reliable) forecasts, communication and collaboration are enhanced. The creation of a forecast is just the first step in the process. A forecast must also be communicated throughout an organization and often must be “sold” in the process. When managers can discuss forecasts in understandable terms, the decisions that result from those forecasts are more effective.

View – and manage – your business at any level of detail

As a general rule, if you can quantify what you need to know, you can find the answer in Demand Solutions. Including:

• What are my total sales by brand? In dollars? In Euros? Any currency?
• What’s the current fiscal year projection for each of our business units, and for the entire company?
• Which segment of our business projects the best growth this year?
• Which items have the highest inventory turns? The fewest?
• Who are my most profitable customers?

Demand Solutions enables you to combine groups of items into the consolidated view of the business that best supports your needs and interests. Unlike some systems that require your IT department to hard-code your product family structures or pyramid relationships, the product family groupings in DS are user-defined. From day one, users of Demand Solutions can define and create their own product families, reflecting the dynamic ways your sales, marketing, production planning, purchasing, finance and other managers view your business.

Focus on what’s important

The best way to find a needle in a haystack is to shrink the haystack and to use a magnet.

Demand Solutions includes numerous manage-by-exception options that enable you to use your knowledge of the business to quantify exception conditions, and then use the system’s “Filters,” and “Dynamic Range Selection” capabilities as the magnets that enable you to zero in on the items that require your attention.

In addition, you can use ABC Analysis to rank any segment of your business (Items, Customers, Product Families, etc.) to focus on your most profitable opportunities, and to weed out the under performers. Many managers take the 80/20 principal for granted. However, when DS quickly shows you that 90% of your revenue comes from 10% of your customers, or that the bottom 40% of the items that you carry account for just 1% of your Gross Margins, you will quickly begin to benefit from the objective insights that DS provides.

Objectively manage new product introductions

Forecasting is never easy. Forecasting new products - for which you have no history, but for which you might have an abundance of subjective enthusiasm—just might be the most difficult forecasting challenge there is.

DS FM’s Curves enable you to objectively forecast new products by cloning the demand pattern from similar products, and then updating your new product forecasts by applying their initial actual sales to the Curve. While it’s undeniably difficult to accurately forecast new products, it’s equally hard to be objective about their prospects. DS FM’s Curves respond quickly and dispassionately to each new product’s initial sales. DS also includes a Supersession feature that enables you to easily manage product phase-outs and phase-ins.

You are smarter than the software


It’s important to remember that the software is a tool—and that many managers will have insights and information that can be easily integrated to improve the quality of your forecasts. Demand Solutions will accept multiple inputs—including customer forecasts, management over-rides, anecdotal notes about future developments, promotional curves and much more. Forecasting is a process that can be consistently improved over time, and the disciplined process that we will help you build is even more important than the software.

Uniquely flexible data exchange capabilities

Our clients use Demand Solutions as the forecasting front end to virtually every ERP package.

We accept the challenge of making it as simple as possible to interface with your existing systems and to move your data into and out of our software.

Demand Solutions point-and-click User-Definable Import/Export utility enables you to quickly and simply define the data that you are importing or exporting. Also, the DS Batch Builder is a very intuitive tool for scripting your repetitive procedures.

Dashboards for better response

Demand Solutions Dashboards provide a way to visually present critical data in summary form. The Dashboard functionality is customizable by job function so planners can see the views they need and everyone can make quick decisions and respond to management’s ever-changing desire to see forecasting information in multiple formats.

All the forecasting data you need for smart business decisions is within the DS Forecasting system and now, with the Dashboards, you can view data as information to help reduce inventory and maximize profits.