Demand Management

Why Demand Management?

Demand Management refers to activities relating to product demand before Sales actually takes place. Demand management is an obvious priority for all organizations. Demand Management as such is a vast subject, and demand monitoring and calibration is a crucial part of it.

Demand Monitoring involves understanding the demand from micro markets as well as forming the big picture of demand. Demand monitoring often requires detailed, often microscopic monitoring of demand and audit history of demand to make informed decisions.

Without proactive demand monitoring several crucial aspects of revenue impacting decisions can be compromised including the following:

• Promotions decisions
• Pricing decisions
• Distribution Chain decisions
• Production priorities
• Logistics decisions

All these have a direct and significant impact on revenues making Demand Management as one of the top priorities of modern day Marketing and Sales Management.

Issues in Demand Management

Demand Monitoring as crucial as it is, requires several issues to be addressed including the following:

• Measure Deep but deliver big picture: Demand comes from smallest micro markets and effective Demand Monitoring requires tracking demand from the smallest of Micro Markets. While doing so, objectives of forming big pictures should not be lost.
• Audit Trail: Demand Management often is comparative, not absolute. Hence effective growth in demand from Micro Markets must be measurable via an audit trail. Audit trail must enable multiple dimensions of reporting where historical trends can be assessed and acted upon.
• Demand Calibration Workflows: Since Demand has strong influence on various aspects of organization functions (such as logistics, production, finance, procurement etc), incorrect demand figures has the potential to cause negative cost implications. Thus demand forecasts from market must be calibrated before used as basis of decision making and processing.
• External Partners involvement: Demand by its definition comes from external entities. While most organizations have processes in place for structured transactions such as Sales Orders, a key issue is forecasting demand with involvement of external partners and monitoring, managing it.
• Demand calibration with time: Often Demand forecasting requires refining as we get closer to time of realizing it in form of sales and must be forecasted for well into future. Achieving both is a key feature of Demand Monitoring.
• Data Protection: Demand is a sensitive subject with number of issues tied to it. It is a key issue to restrict access to Demand information by data to those in the Sales Organization who are authorized to see it.
• Automated alerting and monitoring: With demand forecasting expected from a large number of external partners, it is a key issue to ensure that automated monitoring of missed forecasting information, errors and trends etc are automatically computed by the system.

Our Solution

Our solution Outreach addresses all above issues effectively, for example:

• Don't lose out seeing the wood for the trees! Outreach automatically generates average prices, demand forecast views moving up in sales hierarchy of sales territory. Thus enabling decision making on broad analysis derived from detailed micro market level data, while retaining the ability to drill down at lowest micro market levels for issue analysis and remedial actions.

• Outreach includes report that enable viewing demand for various products and various micro markets on a single graph over a period of time. Thus it serves as an effective tool for audit trail maintenance and comparative analysis of demand from multi-dimensions.

• Outreach has strong inbuilt features to control who can report demand data for which micro market, thus delivering complete control for ensuring only authorized data is accepted for processing. The Authorization checks are applied at data level (for example, who can report for which POS in the sales organization etc.).
• Outreach provides features for Manual calibration of demand before it is accepted for processing in the system, thus ensuring that only verified demand data forms the basis of any processing and decision making.

• Outreach extends reach of your organization by enabling external providers’ ability to participate in demand forecasting directly, over multiple channels such as via Mobile App or direct forms online via very easy to use interfaces.

• Outreach allows for customization of demand forecasting period, thus you can customize to your organization standards such as monthly or quarterly demand forecasting. Once period is defined, all demand is tracked for the defined Forecasting period
• Further the demand is accumulated for delivering the ability to track demand at various levels of sales territory. For example, the total demand may be automatically calculated for a sales territory based on underlying market divisions and so forth.
• The demand can be calibrated by encouraging demand forecast to be recorded for several periods in advance and then refined via overriding demand forecast figures.