Demand Planners challenges:

• A growing product range to keep stocked up
• New product launches that lack any historical forecast to rely on for new products
• An ever-changing market with new customers with new buying habits
• Risk of buying too much inventory to satisfy customer service levels
• Prioritising a limited budget to acquiesce to multiple purchase request from sales
• Unquantified demand changes from Sales
• Estimating customer demand with limited data
• Reliant on offline tools like excel with limited predictive capability
• Difficult to separate out the historical and promotional sales activity
• Uncertainty of current stock position
• Inventory obsolescence
• Uncoordinated product obsolescence

Staying proactive can be a challenge for sales teams. With multiple customer relationships to manage and a growing product range to sell, how do sales choose which product to talk to which customer about?

Sales’ challenges:

• Visibility of buying trends of their customers
• Competitor activity in their sales territory
• Having the right stock available when required
• Poor understanding of material lead times and visibility of the expected deliveries
• Ability to capture and leverage market intelligence in real time on site with the customer

Production planners are focused on maintaining service levels and making improvements that increase efficiency. They are in the front line of a manufacturing business balancing customer orders, against labour resources and available materials.

Production Planner issues:

• Ensuring sufficient materials for the manufacturing process
• Managing people resources
• Making sure materials are of the right quality
• No visibility of commercial priorities
• Planning for change overs in manufacturing line
• Keeping the plant operating smoothly in line with their service plans
• Managing unexpected events – machine breakdowns, raw material shortages, staff sickness