Overview of the Client

Our client is a leading global manufacturer that makes products to improve the quality of our everyday life.

Business Challenges and Objectives

Our client’s objective was to deliver a solution that could ultimately help support a process to generate a sales forecast to better inform business planning.

Key Challenges:

  • A generated forecast that uses prior year actuals that is owned and changed by the sales managers.
  • A generated forecast that is based off the demand plan that is owned and managed by demand planners.
  • A bottom-up forecast that is created at the lowest level of granularity for enterprise teams.
  • The need for sales forecasts to be entered and maintained at higher levels of the business hierarchy but produce outputs that can be analyzed at a more granular level.
  • A consensus sales forecast established through a collaborative process between teams that becomes the basis of a plan for Finance

The Solution

  • Configured systems  to allow the base forecast to be based on prior year sales or the demand plan
  • Created KPIs, input templates and reports to support the process
  • Created functionality to allow sales teams to plan their forecasts directly by sku and customer
  • Solution allows imports of forecast in bulk for sales managers that need to enter their forecasts as one number
  • Sales managers manage levers like growth rates, risks, and opportunities to generate an accurate forecast
  • Allocated sales forecast is automatically updated with any change in the planned forecast or forecast levers
  • Created functionality to override or hold allocations and keep the same overall sales forecast at the level it was entered
  • Microsoft Azure houses sales actuals and demand plan data that is loaded automatically through created integrations
  • Solution allows for the sales forecast to be snapshot allowing sales teams to view prior forecasts while adjusting the active forecast for the changing market
  • Automated extracts to send the sales forecasts into Azure allowing all systems to be connected with the same data
  • Functionality built for sales teams to view their weekly sales pacing to track against forecasts
  • Reporting created to allow sales teams to track forecasts at multiple levels and forecast accuracy at 30,60, and 90 days

Business Outcomes and Benefits

  • Forecast on a two-year horizon, which provides deeper insights into future outcomes and better decision making
  • Highly automated solution that shifts business users time from being data stewards to data analysts
  • Automation, real-time data aggregation/consolidation and improvement in overall data accuracy has produced time savings and a more efficient process
  • Solution allows sales teams to align and collaborate on a unified sales forecast
  • Solution allows sales teams to input forecasts at varying degrees of granularity and generates a consolidated output for reporting.
  • Snapshots of forecasts lead to greater tracking and visibility for increased accuracy in future planning
  • Over time, the client believes the solution will result in improved forecast accuracy, which was a key objective of the project.
“I truly believe the Forecasting Tool developed in close partnership with TekLink will allow our company to have better visibility into our consumer and customer demand. The ability to monitor and accurately predict retailer inventory levels is an organizational muscle which will pay dividends throughout the organization: From strategy to finance to supply chain. The Forecasting Tool will help to improve on what was a very time consuming, manual, and inaccurate process for our company.”

Senior Director | Global Demand Planning and S&OP