Client Overview
Our client is a global leader in access solutions and products. They design and engineer garage door openers, commercial door operators, and gate entry systems. Our client is also the largest wholesale distributor of perimeter access control equipment across the United States.
Business Challenges and Objectives
- Manually generated forecast is very far from actual sales, they want to improve forecast accuracy.
- Collecting data for reporting and analysis of forecast, actuals and Market share data is too time consuming.
- The client wanted to have a system with the ability to load Salesforce Data for Key Customer Accounts.
- The client wanted to automate the planning steps to reduce the room for error.
- The client wanted a tool with strong data analysis features to review and compare the forecast and market share data among different groups.
- They required the system to provide more detailed information for analysis that is not entered during the forecast process (e.g., Units and Product Family).
The Solution
- A new Sales forecasting system was implemented with a modern planning platform to eliminate manual efforts.
- Actual sales data was loaded at a granular level into the new system.
- Predictive capabilities were used to generate a statistical forecast to use as a baseline based on actual sales historical information.
- Reports and Dashboards were created to track forecast accuracy which can be used for further analysis.
- Allocation capabilities were used for the generation of detailed information.
Key Benefits
- Improved forecast accuracy as Predictive model is more accurate than manual process.
- Improve productivity as users only need to enter adjustments to the generated baseline.
- Elimination of user error through the automation of calculations.
- The team has more time to work on analysis instead of the operation of the planning process.
- A single repository for the market share data and forecast information.
- Standard reports for tracking the forecast accuracy at multiple levels.
