Demand Planning

Demand planning is a process of managing all the demands of the products to enable the Master Scheduler / Planner to plan the supply. The two main components of the Demand are ‘Forecast’ and ‘Sales Order’.

Kinds of Demand:

Dependent Demand: It is the demand for the product caused by the demand of other products. E.g. demand for the raw material like steel and rubber increases in case the demand for automobiles is increased.

Independent Demand: If the demand of the product is not dependent on any product, then it is independent demand. Demand for the automobiles in the above example is the independent demand.

Following are the sources for demand:

·         Referrers & Consumers
·         Dealers & Distributors
·         Intercompany
·         Service needs

Demand planning covers the following activities:

·         Forecasting
·         Order entry / Promising,

·         Branch Warehouse Requirements,
·         Interplant / Inter-organizational requirement,
·         Service Parts requirements

Demand planning also helps in long-term and short term process selection, capacity planning and facility planning.

Key Demand Drivers:

Customers: Customers are king in today’s era. Customer preferences, general perception, word of mouth etc. play a key role in demand generation.

Competitors: New competitors, competitor’s differentiation in product and technology are major threats to the business.

Economic Policies: State and Central government policies has major impact on the customer spending and hence on the demand of the products.

Regulatory Policies: Legal guidelines set by the authorities can increase or decrease the demand.

Order winners or Qualifiers: Customer expectations are based on cost, quality, delivery and after sales service are the order qualifiers. If the product / service have special characteristics that attract the customers over competitors are the order winners.

Marketing strategy: Determining the marketing segment, developing market niches, analyzing competition and increasing the market share are some of the key marketing strategies that boost the demand.

Customer Relationship: In today’s cut throat competition, customers are continuously required to be informed about the new products, sales, schemes, annual maintenance discounts and so on to develop loyalty.

Characteristics of Demand:  Trend, Seasonality, Random variations, Cyclical

Demand Planning consist of collation of data, selection of appropriate techniques, forecasting and then taking corrective action if actual demand varies significantly.

Demand Planning objectives:

• Planning of long lead time resources like assembly line installations, capital equipments
• Planning of medium or short term resources like material, human resources etc.
• Shorten customer delivery time

Key forecasting principles:

• Forecast will never be accurate
• Forecast shall include estimate of error
• Forecast is more accurate for shorter periods
• Forecasts are more accurate for a family or group of products

Forecasting Methods:

·         Qualitative Techniques:

o   Grass roots

o   Market research

o   Panel consensus

o   Historical Analogy

o   Delphi Method

·         Quantitative Methods

o  Extrinsic technique: Certain set of external factors are taken into consideration like independent demand, GDP growth, agricultural production, steel production, oil prices, housing sector growth etc.

o    Intrinsic techniques: These use the historical recorded data for future estimates.

§  Average demand

§  Simple moving average

§  Weighted moving average

§  Exponential smoothening

§  Seasonal index

§  Regression Analysis