Demand Planning

Absolute Value’s Demand Planning software solution helps you manage your largest and most costly asset – your inventory. The software’s dynamic capabilities streamline purchasing workflows, allowing users to focus on business issues rather than manual tasks. By tightly combining demand planning and replenishment, the solution ensures your inventory is at the right place at the right time, while improving customer service levels.

Extend Your ERP

By integrating directly into your system, the solution extends your ERP investment while upgrading your demand planning capabilities.

Key data is synchronized between the Demand Planning software and your ERP system, ensuring planning decisions are made with the most current information available. Formatted to provide an intuitive buyer’s workbench, Demand Planning helps put everything you need to make inventory-related decisions right at your fingertips.

The resulting forecasting and replenishment recommendations, in the form of purchase orders and transfer orders, are then pushed back to your ERP system for execution.

Start With the Forecast

Any forecasting tool is only as good as the accuracy of its historical data. Demand Planning provides several ways to improve the accuracy of your historical data, including filtering usage, smoothing usage, redirecting usage, cloning, and collaborative input.

Demand Planning assigns a best-fit formula to each item in each warehouse. The result is a forecast extended up to 52 periods (typically 12-15 months).

Long-Lead-Time & Seasonal Items

Long-Lead-Time Items: Demand Planning factors in the impact of long lead times when making forecasting and replenishment decisions, ensuring you have the items you need, when you need them.

Seasonal Items: The base formulas provided include multiple formulas designed to identify seasonal trends and provide more accurate forecasts. Safety stock is dynamically adjusted for seasonal items, protecting against in-season stockouts and surplus inventory at the end of the season.

Collaborate With Customers & Vendors

Customer Collaboration: The collaborative tool allows users to import customer-provided forecasts and make them part of the overall forecast. Alternatively, Demand Planning can create a forecast specifically for a customer and export it to Excel, so it can be shared with them for their input.

Vendor Collaboration: This tool creates a collaborative forecast for you to provide to your suppliers. The collaborative forecast shows your anticipated demand over the coming months.

Replenishment

Buyers have unprecedented visibility into all of the calculations behind the system’s recommendations. While Demand Planning uses state-of-the-art algorithms and methodologies, as well as machine learning, it never takes the “brains” out of the equation. When the system presents buyers with recommendations, they can always apply their own industry or product knowledge to validate or improve the result.

Through the use of dynamic controls, Demand Planning reacts to changes related to inventory, demand, or to the demand plan itself. This allows the system to automatically make adjustments if it detects an over-consumption of the forecast. Having the ability to quickly react, Demand Planning can minimize the chance of a future stockout by increasing the suggested order quantity.

Suggested orders are created either automatically or on demand, making a suggestion of the items and quantity to purchase.

Vendor Targets

In addition to creating a suggestion for what is needed, Demand Planning also compares the suggested order to the vendor’s targets. Targets can be set by dollar amount, weight (net and gross), or volume.

Multi-Warehouse

Multi-warehouse environments often have an inventory need in one warehouse and a surplus in another. With Demand Planning, buyers are presented with the availability of surplus quantities by warehouse, and can choose to transfer all, part, or none of the quantity.

Hub & Spoke

Demand Planning greatly simplifies multi-warehouse planning by offering the flexibility to set up a replenishment path down to the item level. This allows you to have any warehouse function as a hub for any item or vendor combination. By periodically creating inventory balancing transfer orders, the system can move inventory from the hub to the spoke as needed.

Cloud Advantage

Demand Planning is implemented in the Microsoft Cloud and managed by Absolute Value, LLC, a Lanham Company. Analyzing Demand Planning data in the cloud means there is no long-term contract, and your processing power can expand and contract as needed. Additionally, by processing in the cloud, suppliers are able to prevent large quantities of data, and the associated processing, from putting too high a demand on their ERP systems – eliminating worries of potentially slowing ERP performance.

Users have full access to the system using web browser, tablet or phone, and will receive alerts via email.

Analyze Surplus & Excess

Demand Planning analyzes every item in every warehouse daily. It then divides the on-hand quantity of each item into good, surplus, and excess categories, and extends these quantities to dollars, which means you can see exactly where your inventory dollars are invested!

About Absolute Value

Absolute Value has extensive roots in the distribution software industry with specific strengths in Supply Chain Management. Comprised of both end-user and software vendor experience, the Absolute Value team bridges a dual perspective on the complex needs of today’s distributors.

As a Lanham Company, Absolute Value blends this depth of supply chain management experience with knowledge of stateof-the-art technology and application solutions to provide clients with a unique pathway to success.

Absolute Value was formed to bring the benefits of Microsoft Gold Certified ISV Lanham Associates’ software and service solutions to a wider audience, by making them available in an ERP-independent environment.

Contact Information

Absolute Value Headquarters
1 Meca Way
Norcross, GA 30093 USA
Phone: +1-678-905-1204
Email: avinfo@absolutevalue-us.com