Meet Consumer Expectations and Gain Sales Insight With OrderWise Forward Demand Forecasting

Demand forecasting is one of the most valuable, but difficult challenges a business can face when trying to achieve effective supply chain and sales order management. However, when conducted correctly, businesses can reap the benefits of better optimised stock control, including higher turnover and reduced stock holding costs.

Many factors can affect a business’ ability to accurately forecast demand, for example seasonal fluctuations. These can heavily influence consumer demand on products at certain times of the year and therefore need to be carefully controlled for both sales and purchasing purposes. During peak periods, businesses may need to forecast higher demand for seasonal items, without causing these products to then be overstocked the rest of the year or included in predicted sales figures. These issues arise when businesses decide to rely on gut feeling rather than historical data to cater for any expected changes to demand.

Manually manipulating and interpreting data to forecast in this way is simply impractical for many businesses, especially with fast-changing consumer demands and the seasonality of products causing constant popularity shifts. Therefore, without the correct system in place to effectively monitor and control demand forecasting, businesses are unable to gain the understanding they need to meet their sales and purchasing requirements. As a result, businesses may find themselves overestimating sales predictions, with dead capital also tied up in unsold stock.

Provide Staff With The Visibility They Need To Accurately Forecast Customer Demand

With OrderWise Forward Demand Forecasting, customers are already able to achieve in-depth stock forecasting control by specifying forecasted demand against an individual stock item and an individual customer. By using this functionality alongside the OrderWise purchasing report, users can easily manage expected future demand, including which products are needed, the quantities required, where the demand has come from and for when the stock needs to be available.

Now this month, a new feature has been added to OrderWise Forward Demand Forecasting for a new Customer Forecasting Report. This great new feature enables demand forecasting to also be brought into a sales capacity, offering full visibility of predicted sales by customer within a grid format. Within this grid, users can input, manage and analyse customer forecasting based on specific products, dates, stock locations and more. With the ability to update and save changes to price, users of this new Customer Forecasting report can gain one-view visibility of predicted sales and cash flow month by month, as well as total expected revenue for the year.

Through using OrderWise Forward Demand Forecasting, businesses can harness the wealth of stock and sales data stored within their software to ensure they have complete control over expected requirements. By using the information provided in the customer and purchase reports, businesses using OrderWise can ensure they can accurately and effectively manage their sales and stock forecasting all year-round.

If you would like to find out more about the new demand forecasting functionality, then please contact us on 01522 704083.