SAS® Demand-Driven Forecasting

Integrate advanced analytics into the S&OP process for profitable demand response.

In today’s dynamic markets, inaccurate forecasts can put your organization at a competitive disadvantage and prohibit you from driving top-line growth and fulfilling customers’ needs. Traditional ERP/SCM systems lack the analytic sophistication to translate customer and other upstream demand data into a plan to maximize market opportunity and customer satisfaction.

SAS Demand-Driven Forecasting combines the power of automation, analytics and workflow to generate the most unbiased and accurate forecast on a large-scale basis. SAS software’s what-if analysis and scenario modeling capabilities help organizations plan for future events – including new product, location and channel introduction – and simulate the impact of possible marketing investment strategies and product mixes to find the optimal forecasting scenario for maximum profitability.

Providing access across the enterprise to monitor, track and report, SAS Demand-Driven Forecasting provides large-scale, automated statistical model selection and optimization for complex supply chain networks with complex business rules to optimize your S&OP process and allocate limited resources to the most profitable products and customers:

• Harness your existing data with powerful analytics through a user-friendly interface, and build a workflow designed around your processes.
• Use business intelligence to drive what-if analysis and disseminate the results across your organization to make better decisions.
• Automatically create a weighted consensus forecast by tracking variation between forecasted and actual sales to aid the S&OP process.
• Support a formal S&OP process with strong methodologies that incorporate an understanding of organizational dynamics.
• Reduce finished goods inventory levels and stock-outs and shorten the time it takes to drive your supply chain to realize significant savings.
• Develop a profitable demand plan based on optimal product mix and marketing investment strategies to improve forecasting performance across your product hierarchy.

For organizations that have existing investments in SAP technology, SAS® Forecasting for SAP APO provides ideal demand forecasting and planning by combining superior SAS forecasting with the strength of 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 enabling your organization from to be proactive rather than reactive.

The SAS Difference

• Only SAS offers an automatically generated business/product hierarchy with assessment at every level for the appropriate statistical model and forecasts.
• SAS provides the depth and breadth to model and predict incremental (lifts) sales volume associated with sales promotions, marketing events and other irregular activities that affect sales demand.
• The SAS integrated what-if simulation, scenario planning, and an Advanced Consensus Forecasting Planner Workbench allow for automated, statistically driven, weighted consensus forecasting with gap analysis monitoring and reporting with alerts.
• The SAS interactive dashboard with balanced scorecard disseminates forecast performance metrics and tracking reports across the enterprise.