Demand Skillset
A Faster, Smarter Prediction
The Aera Demand Skillset senses, predicts, and tracks changes in demand to generate the most accurate forecasts possible.
The Aera Demand Skillset provides solutions to the challenges inherent with the complex reality of managing forecasting today. The Skillset addresses the common issue planners face, which is the high amount of manual work planners require to sustain their forecast process, including data preparation, promotion uplift, and managing a portfolio of products in different phases of their lifecycles. It also helps to address the challenges with traditional forecasts that are over-reliant on past sales performance and don’t take important demand drivers into consideration.
With the Demand Skillset, Aera senses, predicts, and tracks changes in demand in real-time and generates the most accurate forecast possible. The Skillset applies cognitive intelligence to supply, capacity, and demand plans to allow for easy, rapid adjustment when variances arise. It further aligns S&OP with financial goals by creating consensus-based plans. Aera's process automation capabilities further allow planners to spend more time on strategic issues rather than repetitive tasks.
Benefits
- Dramatically improves forecasts and service levels.
- Predicts variability and recommends real-time improvements to the plan.
- Allows planners to focus on higher value-add activities by reducing the effort to plan and correlate different data sources required.
- Reduces S&OP cycles and analyzes scenarios in minutes.
- Drives better New Product Introduction (NPI) Plans using metrics like product mix, market opportunity, and gap analysis.
- Supports changes throughout the lifecycle of a product.
Cognitive Skills
- Touchless Demand Forecasting Skill recommends adjustments to forecasts by utilizing a diverse set of demand sensing and internal performance data and applying analytics and machine learning algorithms to predict supply and demand mismatches that could lead to shortages or excess inventory. This Skill operates continuously to enable supply chains to react quickly to shifting demand or disruptions.
- Short-Term Demand Sensing Skill identifies the signals that have an influence on the short- to medium-term forecasts. The Skill overcomes latency issues by reducing the time between an event and the response to it. It helps planners anticipate short-term changes in demand and utilize the forecast as part of replenishment decisions.
- Product Lifecycle Forecasting Skill enables forecasting at different stages of the product lifecycle, addressing the need to model both NPIs and end-of-life product forecasts. The Skill identifies key product attributes and external factors, creates a profile by clustering like products, and derives a launch forecast trend.