Leveraging Demand and Supply Planning to Strike the Right Balance Between Customer Forecast and Inventory Supply

What You Can Expect From This Case Study

1. What is Demand and Supply Forecasting
2. Demand and Supply Forecasting Techniques
3. Why Incorporate Demand and Supply Planning?
4. Factors Affecting Demand and Supply Planning
5. Telecommunication Industry Overview
6. About the Client
7. Predicaments Faced
8. Solution Delivered
9. Business Impact
10. Why Choose Quantzig for Demand and Supply Forecasting Solutions?

Highlights of the Demand and Supply Forecasting Case Study

• Client: A business services telecommunications provider headquartered in the US
• Need: To optimize their demand and supply forecasting and planning capabilities so as to eliminate excess costs, reduce lead time, and increase customer satisfaction
• Impact of Quantzig’s demand and supply forecasting solution: improved operational efficiency, better inventory management, increase in forecast accuracy by 17%

Gain unparalleled insights with demand and supply planning and reinvent your supply chain to combat challenges like market volatility, dynamic demands, global regulations, supplier management, increasing spends.

What is Demand and Supply Forecasting?

Demand forecasting is a technique used for estimating the future customer demand for an organizations products over a defined period, by analyzing historical data on past demand, investigating the competition, and understand market trends and opportunities. The function of demand forecasting and planning is to guide supply chain operations.

Supply forecasting determines how to best fulfill the requirements created from the demand plan. This is done by managing all aspects of inventory production and logistics, such as planned and received orders, current inventory, minimum order quantities, lead times, optimizing production, and managing safety stocks.

Together, demand forecasting and supply forecasting enable organizations to create the optimum production plan, reduce inventory holding costs, eliminate inefficiencies and bottlenecks, and meet customer demands efficiently.

Demand and Supply Forecasting Techniques

The top demand forecasting methods are:

1. Trend Projection – Using past sales data to predict future sales, while adjusting for historical anomalies (like a demand spike that is unlikely to repeat)
2. Market Research – Using customer surveys to gather valuable insights on customer needs and expectations
3. Sales Feedback – Using sales feedback to understand customer needs, product trends, competitive landscape, and forecast customer demand
4. Delphi Technique – a group decision-making technique that takes the opinion of skilled forecasting experts on the demand for products in the future
5. Econometric Method – Combining sales data with information on external parameters that impact demand to predict future customer demand
6. Barometric Method – Predicting demand on the basis of past events or key variables occurring in the present

Once an approved demand forecast is in place, the supply forecasting and planning process commences. This process uses automated software to generate the forecast to be applied against specific ship-from locations, detailing the supply plan. This, in turn, enables organizations to create a data-driven, accurate production plan.

To know more about the factors affecting demand and supply planning and the methods to tackle them, get in touch with our advanced analytics experts today.

Why Incorporate Demand and Supply Planning?

To deal with the shortcomings of traditional supply chain management systems and several other factors affecting demand and supply planning, organizations are now realizing the need to improve demand and quantity planning to help predict future demand patterns and respond in an agile manner to varying customer needs. Moreover, this becomes a necessity as there is a growing need to sense market demand and translate the requirements into supply chain responses.

Factors Affecting Demand and Supply Planning

Several factors affect a companys ability to service its consumers and optimize the supply chain. Some of the factors affecting demand and supply planning include:

• Changes in pricing
• Costs of supply chain management
• Interest rate and investment climate
• Government policy
• Laws and regulations
• Population growth

To cope with the factors affecting demand and supply planning, businesses must employ effective demand and supply planning strategies.

Request a free proposal to learn how you can leverage Quantzigs demand and supply forecasting solutions to continually achieve synchronization and alignment between all business units and and make data-driven decisions with regard to demand and supply.

Telecommunication Industry Overview

The telecommunication industry has witnessed rapid changes over the last few years. Advancements in technology have completely altered the market landscape for the telecommunication industry. The advent of 4G, smartphones, and diverse mobile applications has transformed the way people consume telecom services. However, such disruptive innovations are posing challenges for telcos as they are looking for means to stabilize their revenue streams.

Some of the factors affecting demand and supply planning in the telecommunication industry include:

• Higher levels of connectivity: Today, with the relentless growth in technology, IoT is slowly paving its way into the telecommunications network space. This places a lot of pressure on the network providers to streamline their technical capabilities to meet the growing demand.
• Competition from other OTT services: It is estimated that approximately 2.5 billion people worldwide rely on messaging apps as compared to the conventional text services offered by telcos. This recent increase in the number of OTT service providers is compelling telecommunication network providers to focus on innovations to scale their service offerings.

About the Client

The client is a business services telecommunications provider headquartered in the US. It is one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies and has been around for over 100 years. In order to reach more subscribers and offer innovative products and services, this telecommunications giant is in the process of adopting end-to-end AI and analytics capabilities.

After learning about Quantzig from a leading business publication, the client decided to connect with our experts.

Predicaments Faced

The client, a telecommunication industry client, wanted to seek ways to devise reliable market forecasts and improve the customer service levels. To accomplish this, they wanted to predict and forecast the demand for telecommunication products and services accurately and match the supply to demand. They also wanted to ensure that their products are produced at the right time and delivered seamlessly. Moreover, with the help of Quantzigs demand and supply planning solution, the client wanted to coordinate the planning and marketing process to reduce inconsistency and address issues pertaining to operational inefficiencies and missed opportunities.

Our end-to-end demand and supply planning solutions are designed to help our clients create accurate plans by taking into account intelligent insights derived from past sales and production performance.

Solution Delivered

With the help of the supply and demand forecasting solution offered by Quantzig, the telecommunication industry client was able to predict customers demand patterns and meet the production requirements. Additionally, the telecommunication industry client was further able to consider the trends, seasonality, and the cost of production to decrease stock-outs. This helped them to better manage their inventory.

Business Impact

Moreover, the supply and demand forecast helped:

• Drive valuable improvements in the supply chain performance
• Develop a strong inventory replenishment plan
• Increase forecast accuracy by 17%

Why Choose Quantzig’s Demand and Supply Forecasting Solutions?

Quantzig is the world’s foremost full-service advanced analytics and business intelligence solution provider, turning clients’ complex, unstructured data into intelligent, actionable insights that enable them to solve complex business problems and inspire innovation, change, and growth. Over the past 16 years, our insights have helped over 120 clients spanning across industries and sectors like Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences, Retail and CPG, Food and Beverage, and more. We have successfully delivered 1500 in-depth solutions in areas like Marketing Analytics, Customer Analytics, Supply Chain Analytics, and more.

At Quantzig, we firmly believe that the competencies to harness maximum insights from the influx of continuous information around us will drive any organization’s competitive eagerness and success. Our objective is to bring together the best combination of analysts and consultants to complementfood and beverage organizations with a shared need to discover and build those capabilities and drive continuous business excellence through advanced analytics.

Demand and supply planning helps organizations improve forecast accuracy, cut inventory costs, boost working capital, increase revenue and market share, and improves marketing and sales effectiveness. Our end-to-end demand and supply forecasting solutions are designed to help our clients create accurate plans by taking into account intelligent insights derived from past sales and production performance. If you are interested to know how you can achieve tremendous business growth fast with the help of advanced analytics, check our solution portfolio here. For availing our 4-week no-cost pilot offer, click here.