Demand Forecasting for Refining
Deliver the right quantity of product to the right customer at the right time
Refiners are increasingly seeing the value of implementing demand forecasting technologies to understand the demand for gasoline and chemicals in regional, national and international markets. Forecasting demand can help address the pressures on profit that come from kinks in the supply chain and subsequently keep profit margins at acceptable levels.
" The ability to automatically generate accurate and reliable forecasting models translates into time savings."
—Natale Maiocchi
CIO
Snam Rete Gas
How SAS® Can Help
Refining companies can achieve better ROI on legacy IT investments by maximizing the use of data. With SAS, you can:
- Perform accurate, demand-driven forecasts at any hierarchical level. Using a wide range of forecasting models within our patented forecast engine, you'll get a true picture of demand that relies not only on historical demand data, but also includes consumption data and market indicators such as price, promotions and weather.
- Find correct and complete data when you need it from any system in any format. Data management tools access all types of data, including downstream POS data and upstream supplier data, then automatically transform and cleanse the data to get it ready for analysis.
- Determine optimal demand-shaping options. Test various scenarios and conduct what-if analyses to gauge the impact of changes in your marketing strategies or product mix on demand and profitability.
- Measure forecast performance against KPIs. Interactive dashboards let you monitor, track, alert and report forecast performance metrics.
- Seamlessly integrate robust forecasting within your planning environment. Access SAS® forecasts directly from the SAP APO demand-planning module, improving the accuracy of your forecast without ever leaving your familiar planning environment.
How SAS® Is Different
Improving profit margins in the highly competitive refining industry resides in your ability to create consistent, accurate forecasts of demand over time using analytics-based modeling. SAS helps you achieve this with:
- Comprehensive data integration. Because other forecasting systems do not have integrated data management and data cleansing capabilities, those forecasts will deteriorate over time as data quality erodes. SAS provides a complete portfolio of data integration capabilities to ensure data quality and integrity, enabling you to maintain forecast accuracy.
- What-if analyses. Maximize profitability with the ability to understand the financial impact of changes in the product and marketing mix.
- True business intelligence at your fingertips. SAS offers an integrated business intelligence platform that provides intuitive self-service query and reporting capabilities, pulling data from SAS or other systems. You'll spend less time looking for information and more time driving strategic decisions.
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Tailored to fit your business. With other vendors you either change your processes to fit their solutions or spend lots of money reconfiguring their solutions to fit your processes – in effect, paying twice. SAS solutions are flexible enough to fit your business and deliver rapid ROI.
Related Products and Solutions
SAS® Demand-Driven Forecasting
SAS Demand-Driven Forecasting drives the development of the consensus forecast in conjunction with the sales and operations planning (S&OP) process. Combining the power of automation, analytics and workflow, it generates the most unbiased and accurate consensus forecast on a large-scale basis.
SAS® Forecast Server
SAS Forecast Server generates large quantities of forecasts quickly and automatically without the need for human intervention unless so desired. The software automatically chooses the most appropriate forecasting model, optimizes the model parameters and produces the forecasts. Time series data management capabilities are also included. The ability to preprocess transactional data can save organizations significant time and resources, and the unsurpassed scalability of SAS Forecast Server enables your business to operate more efficiently.
SAS® Forecasting for SAP APO
SAS Forecasting for SAP APO provides organizations ideal demand forecasting and planning by combining superior SAS forecasting with the strength of SAP Advanced Planning & Optimization (SAP APO) planning capabilities. By seamlessly integrating SAS’ award-winning analytics with the SAP APO Demand Planning module, the solution helps you enrich your demand planning process with powerful, yet easy-to-use forecasting functionality, thus transforming your organization from one that simply reacts to one that is proactive.
"SAS Forecasting for SAP APO enables an easier assessment and improvement of forecasting results for companies that have implemented SAP APO for Supply Chain Management. Whereas most companies only define demand profiles and forecasting algorithms in the initial implementation, with SAS, you can define them continually throughout the product and market life cycles, simplifying and continuously improving the forecasting process – leading to sustained success."
—Frode Huse Gjendem
Senior Executive, Supply Chain Practice
Accenture
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