Demand Management: Boycott Sales and Marketing?
Many planners typically boycott the Advanced Planning tool that is struggling to meet their planning needs. Their Demand Management operates in full-blown Excel mode and off-line analytics for most of their planning work – manual compilations of numbers, huge 50 MB spreadsheets and power pivots.
In companies where the models and the tools are not working, Demand Management is totally dependent on Sales and Marketing for their forecast numbers because there is no other benchmark to question the numbers. Planners transform into human typewriters as they say.
This also results in an upwardly biased forecast that goes into the supply chain.
The result: Violent over-reaction that says we should remove the Sales Function from the entire process of forecasting itself.
Should you ignore Sales input into the Monthly Planning process?
Can Stat be your savior?
Can a good statistical forecast co-exist with Sales and Marketing collaboration?
Re-enforcing this also means, calculating several Forecast Value ADD measures:
1. FVA for the Consensus Forecast
2. FVA for the Stat forecast over a naive forecast
3. FVA for Demand planning
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