Shipment Forecasting Application Enables Accurate Trade & Inventory Planning

Business Objective

Our client is a global life sciences and healthcare company, headquartered in the US.

Their Trade S&OP team needed to accurately forecast shipments that would help them in effective inventory management. This was required to be done for their diabetes care unit, specifically for high-selling glucose monitoring devices and test strips.

Challenges

Identifying and treating outliers in historical shipments (purchase deals among wholesalers/retailers)
Accounting for retailer-level differences in shipment frequencies in arriving at an overall plan
Aligning model based forecasting results with quarterly financial targets for tie-outs

Solution Methodology

We built a trade forecasting tool that helps the planning manager accurately forecast at a product SKU, wholesaler/retailer customer level, rolled up to net shipment units and dollars among other inventory management related metrics.

Key Analytics Delivered:

Detailed month-on-month shipment forecasts by each customer, at a product SKU level
A ‘Forecast Manager’ view – that empowers and enables planning managers to:
- Align model forecasts with quarterly financial planning
- Simulate what-if scenarios – create, save and publish multiple forecasting scenarios, based on different days-on-hand and inventory target criteria
Seamless monthly system refresh with updated forecast numbers based on latest actual numbers
Customized BI/visualization reports which can be published to multiple users, sent as email notifications, etc.

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