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Understanding and managing demand throughout the enterprise is critical. Whether crafting new product and promotion strategies to increase sales, transforming the supply chain into a demand-driven supply network, meeting customers’ performance expectations, or reporting accurate financial projections to Wall Street–a continuously visible, accurate picture of demand is required for success. The importance of effective demand management is best reflected by the value it delivers. Companies that have focused their efforts on understanding and managing demand are proven to have significantly reduced supply chain costs, better supply chain responsiveness, and higher revenue and profit than their competitors.
The i2 solution: i2 Demand Manager
With this new focus on demand, the process of demand management has evolved beyond just the periodic generation of a—frequently inaccurate—demand forecast. i2 Demand Manager provides a continuous and tightly integrated process that not only gives organizations the ability to better predict demand but to also understand, communicate, shape, sense, and quickly respond to consumer demand. Some examples of this solution in action include providing visibility into consumer demand to the supplier level, understanding demand predictability to drive optimal inventory levels, or monitoring a new product’s consumer sales in real time so that product can be quickly repositioned to where it is selling the most or plans can be readjusted to meet unexpectedly high demand.
i2 Demand Manager has been created using i2’s experience from helping hundreds of market-leading companies build a best-practice process and software solution for managing consumer demand.
Key capabilities of i2 Demand Manager can include:
- Graphically-designed customized workflows that enable vendor-managed inventory, new product planning, and demand behavior segments that can then be easily integrated in a single, cohesive process
- Promotions management including “what-if” scenarios, automatic determination of optimal promotion scenario, and a patent-pending demand decomposition approach to determine true promotional lift
- Continuous monitoring of leading indicators, competitive activity, consumer sales, supply availability, and plan performance to trigger plan revisions, revise fulfillment strategies, and launch tactical demand-shaping
Benefits of i2 Demand Manager can include:
- Higher revenue and profit margins
- Reduced inventory levels
- Increased service-level performance and customer satisfaction
- Improved product availability while reducing carrying costs, risks, and cash-to-cash cycles
- Improved ability to understand demand behavior and predictability to develop lean manufacturing and proactive risk management strategies
- Improved forecast accuracy
- More effective promotions and new product launches
- Faster response to changes in the demand signal
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