Consulting: Solutions Consulting
Demand Planning LLC consultants have deep knowledge of various demand
forecasting and supply chain management tools including SAP APO, Oracle
Demantra, JDA Manugistics, Demand Solutions, Logility. In the small footprint
market, we have worked with tools like Forecast Pro, John Galt Forecast-X.
We have designed and developed forecasting systems using SAS offered by
the SAS Institute.
SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO)
APO in SCM 4.1 (and SCM 5.0) is a much improved planning system compared
to the previous versions of the tool itself and versus its competition.
APO offers a variety of modeling options from basic time series models
to multiple linear regression models.
- Constant Model or the First Order Exponential Smoothing Models
- Simple Moving Average Models
- Weighted Moving Average Models
- Second Order Exponential Smoothing with Trend
- Holt-Winters Models.
APO DP also offers the capability to model, forecast and manage the
process by exception through
- exception alerts and
- user defined macro alerts.
It is important to leverage the full functionality of APO modeling and
exception management. If implemented correctly, you can take advantage
of the many automated modeling strategies available in APO resulting in
a more streamlined planning process and organization.
To assess if you are getting the mileage out of your million-dollar
SAP implementation, you ask the following questions:
- Am I using a Pareto process in my forecasting activity?
- Are there products and customers that are better left to APO's automated
modeling strategy?
- Am I using a segmented modeling approach?
- How many customer/product segmentations are being reviewed by my
demand planners each month?
- Has APO helped improve our forecast accuracy?
- How is APO helping us simplify and improve the promotional planning
process? Is it integrated into the CRM system?
- Have I created the correct customer grouping for leveraging correlations
across customer forecast errors?
- Has the system simplified and improved forecast reporting process?
- Are we using the system defined error metrics in APO? Why are they
different from the classic MAPE calculations defined in this website?
Demand Planning LLC can conduct a diagnostic of the current configuration
and implementation of the following software applications as well:
- Manugistics
- Oracle Demand Planning or Demantra
- SAP APO
- i2
- Demand Solutions
- SAS for Forecasting and Modeling applications
For more information, contact us.