Spreadsheets can hold your business back. While technology has advanced rapidly, many supply chain leaders still rely on outdated spreadsheets to manage demand and supply planning. Our eBook highlights the risks of this approach.

Spreadsheets are prone to errors, which happen about 88% of the time. This leaves companies vulnerable financially and at risk of losing market share. Tactical planning takes time away from strategic evaluation of options. Sharing spreadsheets for input is time-consuming and error-prone, limiting collaboration between teams. Spreadsheets also don’t use important real-time data from outside sources, restricting planning effectiveness and ability to respond quickly to changes.

Digital planning tools offer many benefits to strengthen your supply chain and improve decision making. Things like real-time insights, more accurate forecasts, and new opportunities – our eBook covers these advantages. Machine learning analyzes internal and external data to provide useful insights and recommendations. This allows planning across products, customers, locations, and flexible strategies. Digital transformation opens doors for forward-thinking companies to align with evolving market trends and spark new revenue ideas.

Ready to upgrade from manual to AI-powered solutions? Our eBook guides the transition step-by-step. We help with goals, alignment across teams, and every part of the process. As a supply chain leader, you don’t need to accept risky spreadsheets. Make room in your plans to implement AI solutions for a digital supply chain.

You’re an executive tasked with managing your company’s complex supply chain. It’s a high-stakes role where uncertainty lurks around every corner, threatening to disrupt operations and eat away at profits. But what if you could gain an advantage? Demand sensing gives you the power to see around those corners.

If you’re an executive in supply chain management today, you know how difficult demand forecasting has become. Between increasing globalization, economic ups and downs, natural disasters, and pandemics, there are so many variables impacting consumer demand that the traditional forecasting methods just don’t cut it anymore. Can you relate to any of these things?

• Your customers’ needs are constantly changing. New technologies, social trends, and competitors are emerging faster than ever. By the time you collect enough historical data to spot a pattern, it may already be irrelevant.
• Lead times are shrinking while costs are rising. You’re under pressure to react quickly while keeping budgets under control and avoiding costly surpluses or stockouts.
• Your supply chain is more global and complex. There are more links to monitor, more ways for disruptions to ripple through the system, and more opportunities for mismatched supply and demand along the value chain.

To overcome these challenges, you need a modern approach to demand sensing that provides real-time visibility into the factors influencing customer demand. Look for solutions that tap into data from across your business and beyond, using artificial intelligence to detect demand signals early and enable fast, data-driven decisions.

The only way to truly gain the upper hand is to stop relying so heavily on historical data and start sensing changes in demand as they happen. With the right demand sensing strategy and tools in place, you’ll have the power to navigate uncertainty, exceed customer expectations, and optimize your supply chain performance. The future may be hard to predict, but it doesn’t have to be hard to manage.

Don’t leave your organization’s fortunes to chance – be proactive and get ahead of the curve. Take control of demand volatility by downloading our eBook today. With the right approach, you can turn uncertainty into a competitive advantage.

As businesses grapple with today’s volatile markets and ever-evolving consumer preferences, the health and outcomes of your supply chain can no longer be sustained by history and hunches. Where decades-old, traditional processes fall short, AI-powered solutions have become a modern source to strengthen demand sensing capabilities, scale businesses, and drive more profitable growth potential.

Download our free checklist to determine if you are ready to make the smart shift!

Improve the accuracy of your forecasting

Outdated systems and manual spreadsheets tend to be time-consuming and prone to errors that introduce risk and limit real scalability. They lack the sophistication to detect and evaluate the complex demand patterns of today’s global economy. AI-powered solutions, however, use machine learning and advanced methods to evaluate and automate the selection of the best fit forecasting models tailored to your product portfolio and go to market business channels, to deliver more accurate market predictions.

Leverage important market signals

Incorporating important channel-specific data as well as point of sale data will improve your forecast accuracy. With access to the real-time realities of your supply chain, teams have the ability to more effectively avoid risk, uncover opportunities, and pivot as needed to scale more efficiently and profitably.

Optimize your inventory

With the advantage of improved demand forecasting, teams are better equipped to avoid the unnecessary carrying costs, misuse of resources, and lost sales that come from overstocking and understocking of inventory. AI enables more holistic visibility into the time-phased needs, desired service goals and available working capital investment, so your team can more effectively plan for promotions, seasonal fluctuations, and other external factors.

Better and faster decision-making

AI has the empowering ability to evaluate multiple scenarios to generate more confident decision- making. With greater visibility, access to more predictive data, and real-time insights, the potential to sense external events and market signals more quickly is in your hands — giving you the power to make smarter decisions, faster.

Enhance collaboration across your business

With the support of AI-powered solutions, there’s greater opportunity to amplify team productivity — and not just for your own team, but across the entirety of your organization. Engaging company-wide leadership with shared information and insights will foster better alignment of resources and improved forecasting.

Create a more ideal customer experience

When you can meet consumer demands with greater accuracy, you ultimately make your customers happy. By using AI and automation to improve your demand planning, you can create more opportunities for customers to engage with your products and build a relationship with your brand.

If you’re still relying on traditional processes to manage demand planning, now is the time to make the smart shift to AI-powered solutions from industry innovators like Firstshift.ai. Firstshift.ai offers cloud-based demand planning software that drives speed, impact, and scale for businesses in this new era of supply chain planning. Schedule your free demo to discover how AI solutions can empower you to predict, sense, and shape the future.