Improve Sales Forecasting and Sales Analysis with Demand Planning
Updated: February 20, 2007
Help improve sales analysis and forecasting with better demand planning
If your analysts and forecasters don’t have insight into historical trends and upcoming events, predicting customer behavior isn't much better than making an educated guess. How can manufacturers and distributors avoid a hit-and-miss approach and make use of the facts to accurately forecast needs? With the right tools, you can look to the data inside your systems to help.
Applications designed specifically for demand planning provide automated tools for mining applicable data deep within your systems, and delivering it to key planners who need it in a familiar format they can use right away. Your decision makers can then plan based on your company's demand history, current or upcoming events and promotions, insight from customer data, and input from trading partners.
When integrated with your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, demand planning applications can help the people in your organization:
| • | Compare calculated forecasts to actual results over time for trend analysis. |
| • | Focus on "hot spots" to prepare for what's coming into high demand. |
| • | Share forecast information securely via the Web through RoleTailored portals. |
| • | Reduce operating costs. |
| • | Streamline production. |
The end result: lower inventory costs, fewer stock outages, faster time to market, and happier customers.
Microsoft Demand Planner for Microsoft Dynamics
Here are a few reasons Microsoft Demand Planner for Microsoft Dynamics can keep cost of ownership down and help you realize a short return on investment:
| • | Easy to use: One of the most common tools among planners is Microsoft Excel. Microsoft Demand Planner is designed with an Excel-like look and feel, providing people with a format many are already familiar with for demand analysis and forecasting techniques. A lower learning curve means employees can be up and running quickly. |
| • | Supports collaboration: Collaboration is essential to derive a realistic, agreed-upon demand plan. Collaboration features within Microsoft Demand Planner provide an Excel-like tool to allow offline collaborative forecasting from field-level personnel interface and allows key field level information to be easily collaborated with statistical forecasts. |
| • | Integrates directly with Microsoft Dynamics: Microsoft Demand Planner is natively integrated with Microsoft Dynamics ERP products, ensuring data accuracy and helping provide an effective, efficient planning tool that can add value to your total solution. |
Press Releases
Microsoft Business Solutions (now Microsoft Dynamics) continues to innovate in support of emerging needs across businesses' supply chain
Microsoft Business Solutions (now Microsoft Dynamics) expands and strengthens current enterprise resource planning solutions
