In today’s fast moving world of growing customer expectations, shrinking lead times, reduced profit margins and inventories, Demand Planners have a big responsibility to act as the first gatekeeper to be able to foresee changes in Demand Signals and accurately make predictions for future. The margin for error is continuously decreasing, as any errors cause a major rippling effect on downstream processes. For example, a change of forecast bias by 5% may induce the following risks;

• Reduced customer service levels
• Increased lead times
• Improper mix of inventory levels leading to possibility of stock outs or over stocked DCs
• Added costs due to firefighting production builds and expediting fulfilment (air freight)

To cope up with this fast-paced supply chains, new metric must be adopted by demand planners all over the world. One of those is Forecast Value Add. I am going to take you through details of Forecast Value add and explain how we can use this to improve the forecasting process. I would also be explaining examples using SAP Integrated Business Planning.

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