Every new product launch presents major challenges in terms of forecasting demand levels over time. The reality is that the lifecycle of a new product is the ultimate unknown from a demand planning perspective. But that’s no excuse for not developing a plan.
Planning for difficult to forecast demand for new products
The short-term lifecycle of new products is difficult to plan and therefore vital to do so in order to avoid costly excess product or lost sales opportunities.
In our view a New Product Introduction (NPI) plan needs to account for:
We use ToolsGroup SO99+ machine learning capabilities in this complex area to help predict demand during launch. It offers advanced attribute clustering that can identify historic demand patterns for similar products and it utilizes stochastic (probabilistic) forecasting to predict baseline demand.
Our New Product Introduction planning software can predict the performance of a product launch early on using advance signals from web analytics and Social Sensing. Traditional NPI forecasting systems using older techniques often fail to account for these indicators, but our advanced demand planning software with embedded machine learning automatically incorporates these inputs and leverages deep learning to respond to early market signals and produce a more accurate launch forecast.
During many new product launches where significant revenue and sales occur in the first few months, our demand planning software and improved forecasting capability promptly reacts to early market signals. This enables planners to better react to the customer response and helps reduce lost sales, optimise stock and generate significant revenue and growth.
New product introduction
