Supply chain collaboration: The demand planner’s role

The demand planner is the business face of your supply chain. They possess both business and operational acumen. They are uniquely trained to speak both in units and dollars and be your bridge between the supply chain and commercial sides of your business. If they’re not frequently at the table in critical business meetings, including integrated business planning (IBP), innovation, and promotional planning, your forecast accuracy and inventory will suffer. 

While statistical forecasting models have improved forecast accuracy, AI and automation are already transforming the demand planning process and accuracy. For demand planners, this change is good. A demand planner’s forecasting abilities deliver significant value, but the more important skill is their cross-functional leadership. 

Demand planners provide not only an objective lens on business opportunities but are also valuable partners in problem-solving and road-mapping. Even more so, the value of the demand planner is their ability to play the role of detective — to interact with the sales and marketing teams and capture the details of upcoming promotions, launches, and marketing campaigns. 

Unlike data captured in historical demand data or demand signals, the inputs the demand planner captures from the cross-functional teams are not detected by models. With AI-driven scenario modeling and forecasting, the demand planner frees up time to focus on driving value as part of cross-functional strategy and collecting information to improve the forecast. Treat your demand planner as part of the commercial team, not just supply chain, to turn your data into actionable growth.

Make your demand planner the objective referee

Let’s take a new product launch for example. Your marketer will use an optimistic volume estimation both to obtain support for the project and to secure dollars for marketing activities. On the other hand, your salesperson will typically understate their estimation to avoid increasing sales goals and quotas. Which estimate should you use? 

This is where the demand planner adds value. As an objective party, they are trained to leverage historical proxies, assessing distribution and sales velocities to arrive at a forecast with less bias. AI-driven scenario modeling capabilities offered by Anaplan further improve this accuracy and agility, especially as details change — which they often do during the launch process. 

Rely on your demand planner as your opportunity scout 

Early, proactive planning allows the team to run up the score and take a commanding lead well ahead of the final whistle. While the typical S&OP or IBP process consists of a recurring series of monthly meetings to review and align on sales performance, financials, forecasts, and operational capabilities, high-performing teams hold a separate monthly huddle to build and evaluate a “war chest” of opportunities. These opportunities could be promotions, marketing campaigns, new distribution, or new pack forms. The team can action this list when gaps materialize in the plan or to offset other business shortfalls.

Your demand planner is trained to spot openings on the field so your team can capitalize on every opportunity. Let them run this recurring brainstorm session. Marketing and sales should feed their inputs to demand planning to provide an objective volume forecast for the scenario. Finance will then provide the financials and run a P&L scenario to assess its attractiveness and viability. 

Anaplan enhances this process with the ability to run opportunity scenarios and store them to assess their impact and with connected planning to easily model their P&L impact. Leadership can further empower cross-functional teams by providing a set of thresholds that, if met, the team can decide to pursue the opportunity. Outside those thresholds, the team would submit all other opportunities for leadership consideration.       

Empower your demand planner to be scorekeeper

When finance, demand planning, sales, and marketing are not aligned to the same revenue number, the players on the field are running in different directions, making winning unlikely. Lack of alignment can lead to missed revenue goals, overproduction, or inventory stockouts that lead to missed revenue opportunities. The key to winning together is that the entire cross-functional team should both jointly own and align to the same number. Your demand planner, as the objective partner, should have responsibility for maintaining this forecast. 

This clarity and visibility provide an objective measure of their status to the target. If a gap exists or the business requires it, the team will leverage their opportunity war chest to request additional resources, such as spend or sales support. IBP enables and simplifies this process, eliminating hours spent on manual spreadsheets and slides. With clear alignment, your team is better positioned to compete and win together.  

Demand planning is a team sport. If your demand planners are not an active player alongside marketing, sales, and finance, your organization is likely missing goals. Anaplan’s IBP capabilities enable all your commercial teams to be champions.