Supply chain planning is a discipline that touches every function within a business—often with financial implications—and therefore it’s no surprise that CFOs often taken a keen interest in the subject. We continue to see examples of poorly designed supply chain planning processes causing significant harm whether through repeated stock outs on key products and often to key customers, bloated inventory, poor cash flow performance, and a general reactive vs. responsive MO.
Fortunately, DemandCaster has effectively transformed the supply chain planning processes for so many companies—enabling them to move beyond clunky and disparate spreadsheets littered throughout a company into a single integrated platform with powerful tools that drive clarity, insight, and collaboration throughout the organization.
We’ve found that CFOs, in particular, rely on DemandCaster to realize the following benefits:
Improved Predictability and Responsiveness
DemandCaster leverages powerful statistical algorithms to drive a forecast and enables managers to manipulate the results based on internal and external factors happening in real-time. Seeing the future provides both the insight and control to respond effectively. This has the effect of changing organizational culture, being less reactive, and aligning activities within the business to meet objectives in an evolving and dynamic environment.
Increased Inventory Turns
A natural byproduct of predictability and responsiveness is the need to keep less inventory on-hand and turning through it more quickly. This also includes less spoilage and reduced risk of obsolescence.
Improved Cash Flow
Less inventory directly improves cash flow performance, but that’s just the start. Our customers tell us that DemandCaster helps them pinpoint the root cause of rising shipping and freight costs—something spreadsheet simply weren’t able to do. For example, STM Brands was able to reduce freight costs to sales by 25 percent year-over-year.
Improved Budgeting
DemandCaster is also an excellent budgeting tool with advanced financial planning capabilities including revenue, cost, and margin forecasting and by customer, segment, location, and more. CFOs can also track actual to plan and restate their budget mid-cycle on the fly.
Improved Collaboration
Perhaps the best and most underestimated benefit of using a tool like DemandCaster is the ability to foster and drive collaboration throughout an organization. This is especially true of customers leveraging our sales and operations planning (S&OP) capabilities, who typically deploy DemandCaster to colleagues in sales, marketing, planning, operations, and finance—these departments find they’re able to come together like never before to find a single source of truth.
Increased Service Levels
Finally, with all of the above, companies are able to do what matters most – improve service levels and customer satisfaction. For many DemandCaster customers, this has become a meaningful source of competitive advantage. For example, ASK Power relies on DemandCaster to maintain their reputation for 99 percent on-time delivery, and lead times as little as two weeks.
Perhaps it’s time to introduce your CFO to a supply chain planning solution that he or she will love today. Discover DemandCaster today
