Demand Planning with Anaplan
The challenge for this project was to bring significant added value to the Demand Planning team in the process of medium to long-term demand and supply planning. It is a complex process that requires a continuous search for balance between sales and supplies, which has become burdensome due to long implementation times and prone to errors often caused by manual management and the tools used for its execution.
For the Demand Planning team, overcoming this challenge results in more conscious and reliable management, but above all, an increase in the time dedicated to decision-making activities favorable to the business.
To meet this challenge, the proposed solution with this project was to create a tool capable of:
Forecast long-term demand based on historical sales data and gather, rationalize, and centralize relevant business information for processes
Automate the decision-making logic used by end users into a calculation tool, thereby limiting low-value manual actions
Forecast strategic information such as inventory control, break-even points and overstock, purchase order forecasting to suppliers, and data analysis
Enable the processing of parallel analysis scenarios, where the Demand Planner can guide the output information by integrating manual adjustments, to enhance decision-making awareness
The Anaplan Cloud platform proved to be the right choice to meet the client’s needs, as it is an excellent planning and collaboration tool.
The implementation of a Statistical Forecasting model allowed the use of predefined statistical forecasting methods to generate monthly sales forecasts per product. Meanwhile, the implementation of a planning model enabled the integration of sales forecasts with stock, promotions, and purchase data to predict long-term inventory trends on a daily and weekly basis. Additionally, Anaplan’s workflow tool allowed the structuring, monitoring, and tracking of the progress of analysis scenarios by market area, facilitating more effective communication and collaboration among team members.