Demand Management

Creating, influencing, and managing demand

What is Demand Management?

Demand Management includes all aspects of deploying your organization's value proposition to the marketplace. Market, channel, customer, and consumer activities are driven from a strategic level through market and market segment roadmaps. These guide market segment plans which are executed through detailed, time-phased sales and marketing activities.

The demand plan requires multiple inputs. Analytics, assumptions, modelling, and customer collaboration are used to generate demand forecasts that integrate with, and drive the operational plans for your organization, while also providing insights for improving sales and marketing performance.

 

Demand Plan Requires Multiple Input

 

Demand execution processes ensure that the response to actual demand is proactively managed in line with market segment plans and include demand sensing, forecast consumption monitoring, abnormal demand management, order commitment through available-to-promise, and service level definition through customer segmentation and prioritization.

How Mature is Your Organization's True Level of Maturity in Demand Management?

Before embarking on any performance improvement program, it is imperative to identify your business’s true level of maturity. The Oliver Wight Maturity Model characterizes a business as being in one of four key phases of maturity: Co-ordination, Business Process Control, Automation, or Integration. Assess your business maturity in Demand Management using our free online self-assessment tool. 

Assess Your Business Maturity

How you can benefit from Demand Management:

  • Identify gaps between the latest demand projections and the annual plan early, providing more time to close them

  • Establish clear accountability and create motivation amongst the sales and marketing teams

  • Eliminate demand forecast bias and improve demand plan accuracy to improve customer service and reduce safety stock

  • Ensure strategic and business plan revenue streams are achieved

  • Increase focus on meeting customer needs and expectations

  • Reduce chaos when orders exceed supply or are less than planned

  • Create trust in the demand plans for short, medium and long-term horizons, allowing in other business functions to use it for planning

  • Integrate volume, value and margin views underpinned by assumptions, vulnerability opportunity management and scenario planning

  • Increase sales revenue

You should consider Demand Management for your business if:

  • You are struggling to hit sales revenue and margin plans

  • It is unclear where growth will come from

  • You are wrestling with poor forecast accuracy and see over or under forecasting

  • Your people across all functions blame the forecast for problems in serving customers and high inventory

  • Ownership of sales and marketing plans is unclear

  • Lack of supply results in chaos and stress for sales, marketing and customer service teams

  • Sales and marketing blame the supply chain for not being able to fulfil demand and for losing sales and customer loyalty

  • You are feeling like you are constantly scrambling to hit the monthly sales plan

How we can help

  • Change management – monitoring and support of the implementation of change and its impact on your people

  • Transfer of our knowledge to your people so they can deploy an effective Demand Management process for your business

  • Facilitate the design of a Demand Management process to best fit your organization and its needs

  • Assessment of your Demand Management process and validation that has achieved Class A level of effectiveness – firmly embedded as the ‘way you do things’ and delivering the benefits you wanted

  • Scoping an action plan to define standards, address issues and take advantage of the opportunities identified, including resourcing, timelines and performance improvement expectations

  • A diagnostic assessment of the effectiveness of your current process, including identifying the root cause of any performance issues

  • Coaching your Demand Management process users as you introduce new ways of working

Demand Management

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