What Is Demand Planning? Tips, Strategies and Tools

What Is Demand Planning? Tips, Strategies and Tools

Demand planning is a cross-functional process that businesses use to meet customer demand while avoiding supply chain or inventory management disruptions. It involves integrating product portfolio management, enterprise resource planning, marketing and sales, and using both internal and external business data to determine the demand forecast. Project management software gives businesses the flexibility to adapt quickly to changes in supply and demand, and Gantt chart project view allows them to create schedules, use resource management tools, filter data and foster cross-functional collaboration. Demand planning can increase profitability, boost customer satisfaction and build efficiency in production planning, inventory management and supply chain operations. Demand planning is an action plan that coordinates the efforts of multiple departments in an organization to meet demand while increasing profitability.

It consists of the analysis of business data to estimate customer demand and create a demand forecast. To create an effective demand forecast, demand planners and project managers use information from areas such as marketing, sales, procurement, product management and supply chain planning. Key elements of demand planning include data collection & data modeling, statistical forecasting, product portfolio management, trade promotion management, business analytics, collaboration, and predictive analytics. These considerations help to make a demand forecast, which is an informed prediction of the demand you expect.