The best – most accurate – forecasts come from pooling knowledge and insight from people in different roles functions across the business. At Brookes, we believe in using technology to help break down silos and bring together all the data that can enable better planning and inventory management.
When we say collaboration, we mean it
Despite the best of intentions, we have often seen attempts to collaborate between functions and people with different levels of knowledge and input to the supply chain fail to produce forecasts that really help the business.
The SO99+ Demand Collaboration Hub (DCH) facilitates collaborative demand planning by combining data from multiple sources and stakeholders (like suppliers and partners), allowing customer service goals to be synchronised with production and operations capacity. DCH is a web application that is available for the primary operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux), tablets and Android/iPhone mobile devices.
Our Demand Collaboration software platform is simple to use so even inexperienced or occasional users can collaborate and contribute to improve forecast planning accuracy. Evaluating and comparing multiple forecast inputs from multiple sources decreases forecast bias and improves demand forecast accuracy.
DCH supports collaboration between internal sources, including marketing and POS data, and external sources, for example partners, retailers, distributors or suppliers. Once Demand Forecasting has provided the baseline forecast, DCH users input their knowledge, data and changes. The machine learning capability within DCH also takes into account seasonal events, weather and other significant factors affecting supply and demand.
This end-to-end collaboration results in far more precise projections that minimise inter-departmental differences and facilitates the SCP or S&OP (Sales and Operations Planning) process, resulting in improved demand forecasting accuracy, fill rates and business efficiency.
