In today's unstable economy, many organizations are finding out that they have inadequate processes to handle demand planning, and traditional methods of predicting demand aren't efficient in a fluctuating market.
Analyses of companies' capabilities clearly demonstrated huge maturity gaps between leaders and laggards in terms of maturity of organizational processes, functional capabilities and technology enablers. Best-in-class organizations consistently shared many characteristics.
Best-in-class companies also consistently reported significant improvements in key performance metrics over a period of two years, such as: improvements in inventory turns, order fulfillment rates, forecast accuracy at both the product family and SKU levels, as well as improvements in gross profit margins – indicating a need for a proactive, process view of demand forecasting.
Research by Purdue University & SAS indicates specific recommendations for organizations striving to move up the demand forecasting maturity curve by providing them an assessment framework to evaluate their current stage, and highlighting the characteristics common to best-class companies.