Identifying opportunities and creating resiliency through proactive demand planning

Demand planning is the process of forecasting and influencing customer demand for products and services. It is essential for optimising business performance, reducing costs and driving results. Many organisations, however, manage demand reactively, responding to changes in demand at or after the point they have been detected. A reactive approach to demand planning can put organisations at a disadvantage, both in terms of capitalising on opportunities in a timely manner to create competitive advantage or putting actions in place to mitigate risks that are core to organisational performance. This paper proposes that a proactive approach to demand planning, leveraging advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and collaborative platforms, can identify future scenarios and enable faster and better decision making.