Provide chain leaders know the ache of misaligned stock. A high-demand product sells out simply as a promotion goes reside. In the meantime, pallets of out of date inventory collect mud within the warehouse.
These aren’t simply planning hiccups — they’re pricey missteps that eat into margins, tie up working capital, and erode buyer belief.
However what in case your forecasts may lastly maintain tempo with at the moment’s volatility?
Think about precisely anticipating demand – even when tendencies shift in a single day, new SKUs launch, or exterior shocks like tariffs, inflation, or climate disrupt the plan.
In the event you’re already utilizing SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP), you’re in a powerful place to take forecasting additional. By layering superior AI into your SAP IBP workflows, you possibly can dramatically enhance forecast accuracy and planning agility—with out altering how your groups work.
The forecast hole that’s costing you hundreds of thousands
Regardless of your business, the margin for error in demand planning is razor-thin:
- Retailers lose income and buyer loyalty when in style merchandise promote out, whereas slow-moving inventory ties up capital.
- Distributors face freight chaos and missed service ranges throughout seasonal peaks, unable to foretell and reply rapidly to shifting volumes.
- CPG manufacturers danger under- or over-producing when promotions or regional shifts aren’t accounted for.
- All planners battle with chilly begins: new or low-history SKUs that conventional fashions can’t forecast reliably.
These challenges are solely intensifying.
Financial volatility, shifting shopper behaviors, tariffs, and climate-related disruptions introduce new variables that make demand tougher to foretell — and even tougher to reply to in time.
Even in strong, enterprise platforms like SAP IBP, conventional forecasting fashions usually rely too closely on restricted historic knowledge and inflexible assumptions. They battle to adapt rapidly to new alerts or scale throughout complicated planning environments with hundreds of SKUs, channels, and geographic areas.
Staying aggressive requires greater than minor tuning. It requires clever techniques that may be taught from change, adapt to complexity, and ship insights at scale.
That’s the place the DataRobot Demand Planning App provides worth.
It enhances your SAP IBP workflows with AI to offer a extra agile, clever, and exact forecasting engine.
Add demand planning precision to your SAP IBP
The DataRobot Demand Planning App integrates directly with SAP IBP, infusing your present planning atmosphere with superior AI forecasting. It really works inside your present workflows, requiring no complicated implementation, retraining, or disruption to planning processes.
Right here’s the way it helps:
- Enhance accuracy the place it issues most: Confidently forecast unstable demand patterns, together with new product launches, promotional spikes, and macroeconomic disruptions.
- Proper-size stock and scale back waste: Align provide chain with precise demand to reduce stockouts and overstocks, liberating up capital and decreasing extra carrying prices.
- Drive adoption with seamless integration: Forecasts seem straight inside SAP IBP, so planners don’t must be taught a brand new device or modify their course of.
- Speed up influence with out overwhelming AI groups: Prebuilt templates automate knowledge prep, mannequin coaching, and deployment so your knowledge science assets can keep centered on strategic priorities.
How AI is altering demand planning
Organizations throughout industries are already utilizing DataRobot for demand planning to ship measurable ROI and scale back forecast danger :
- International vogue retailer: Improved forecast accuracy by 9% on the SKU degree, saving a whole lot of hundreds from overstock losses by higher stock alignment.
- European CPG firm: Maintained 99% inventory availability and lowered held inventory by £500K per thirty days, liberating up working capital and enhancing service ranges.
- Fortune 100 retailer: Elevated Black Friday forecast accuracy to 95%, saving $2M per week by optimized workforce and stock planning.
- Fortune 500 tech firm: Predicted sell-out volumes 4 weeks upfront, enabling extra strategic stock placement round retailer promotions.
These aren’t edge circumstances. They’re proof that the suitable AI resolution, when built-in into the instruments your crew already makes use of, can ship quick and sustainable worth.
What units the Demand Planning App aside
The DataRobot Demand Planning App wasn’t constructed to switch SAP IBP. It was constructed to reinforce and prolong it. It enhances your present funding with differentiated AI capabilities purpose-built for the real-world complexity of demand planning.
Why it’s completely different:
- Prebuilt, customizable forecasting templates designed for chilly begins, promotions, seasonality, and high-SKU environments allow you to get began rapidly and modify as wanted with out ranging from scratch.
- The app adapts in close to actual time, offering flexibility to simply incorporate broader components from different knowledge sources to establish the influence of rising tendencies, geographic variation, and exterior components like climate, inflation, or regulatory adjustments.
- Constructed-in monitoring, drift detection, model management, and auditability assist enterprise-grade accuracy, compliance, and governance.
- Forecast outputs move straight into SAP IBP, so planners can see and use improved forecasts within the instruments they already know, with out retraining or handbook work.
4 methods to strengthen demand planning in a unstable market
For provide chain and AI leaders trying to scale back danger, drive agility, and future-proof your operations, listed below are 4 sensible actions to take now:
- Incorporate exterior alerts: Transcend historic knowledge by integrating real-time alerts like inflation, climate, or social sentiment to anticipate shifts in demand.
- Deal with chilly begins with proxy knowledge. Use clever modeling to precisely forecast demand for brand new SKUs so that they don’t change into blind spots in your planning course of.
- Align on shared KPIs. Strengthen collaboration by making certain provide chain, finance, and AI groups are working towards frequent objectives and measurable outcomes.
- Automate what slows you down: Enhance accuracy and pace by automating knowledge prep and mannequin deployment utilizing instruments designed for scale and repeatability.
Prepared to reinforce SAP IBP with AI?
In unstable markets, each planning determination carries extra weight. Forecasting missteps can ripple throughout your whole provide chain, eroding belief, tying up money, and compromising buyer satisfaction.
The DataRobot Demand Planning App enhances SAP IBP with superior AI-driven forecasting that learns, adapts, and scales as quick as your corporation strikes — with out disrupting the techniques or workflows you depend on.
Need to see what this might seem like in your SAP IBP atmosphere? Schedule a demo.
