Infor has announced Infor Demand Planning version 6.6. Infor Demand Planning 6.6 features enhanced promotion management, real-time demand sense and respond, advanced shelf life management, and intelligent baseline forecasting. The solution includes intuitive user functions such as the advanced forecast edit grid and automatic calendar interpolation.
Infor Demand Planning 6.6 places a greater emphasis on accuracy and agility to improve the capabilities of supply chain forecasting tools. The solution is equipped with advancements in periodic item forecasting and intelligent baseline forecasting, helping to greatly reduce the manual planning effort and smooth the impact of one-off events and sporadic demand. Periodic item forecasting provides a direct benefit to the user by factoring seasonal changes to decrease planning time and provide more precise statistical forecasts.
Infor Demand Planning 6.6 enables user-defined data series modeling, allowing the user to designate the event or time series to be modeled. This helps provide agile and more accurate forecasting to support timelier decision-making. The added functionality prevents users from reacting to non-repeating events and lowers the cost of implementation by reducing customizations. It also utilizes a statistical forecasting approach to estimate the areas where most sales are likely to occur. This creates a significant reduction in planning time and helps optimize predictions. This forecasting approach also helps organizations reduce obsolete stock, as periodic products are not replenished during the off-season.
The solution provides a new facility for managing baseline forecasts to separate statistical and promotional activity. This allows for an automatic reversal of activity surrounding non-repeating sales behavior, which provides an essential component for consumer goods that are impacted by promotional and one-off events. Users can easily define and manage weekly promotion calendars to include trade spend, promo profiles and cannibalization profiles. The application offers the best picture of promotion activity without requiring full trade planning optimization (TPO).
Infor Demand Planning 6.6 is optimized to improve visibility of actual sales behavior, which is aligned through daily, weekly and monthly to date forecasts. The demand sense and respond functionality identifies exceptions and issues an alert to the user when a violation is detected. This enables users to respond to changing market conditions with agility and improve service levels by quickly reacting to real-time demand signals.
“Our customers face the growing challenges associated with a constantly shifting supply chain, and the ability to accurately forecast for such changes can have a serious impact on the success of an organization,” said John Bermudez, Vice President, Product Management, Infor. “Infor Demand Planning 6.6 allows customers to sense the demand and respond, promoting advanced shelf life management and more intelligent baseline forecasting.”