Account Based Forecasting or ABF is a key building block in establishing a collaborative demand planning process with your key customers. Variously called as Customer Specific forecasting or just Account and National Forecasting, the essence of the process is to break down the demand streams into key customer demand and an all other Demand Group that lumps a number of smaller customers into one statistical series.

The idea behind this methodology is the fact that focused selling and promotions are designed around the major customers. As the popular cliché on forecasting goes, such selling activity aggravates the demand volatility. Once these major customers and their volatility-enhancing events are identified and isolated, the remaining All Other Demand stream should be fairly predictable, with simple statistical forecasting models. Learn more...

We are often asked this question.  The Standard safety stock formula just uses the forecast error metric, Lead time and a constant to represent the customer service levels.  This constant can be obtained from the standard normal tables. Here is a list of constants for different service levels.

 Response Management the next wave of supply chain innovation?

That's the question posed by AMR Research's Steve Hochman in a recent article.  Amongst demand-driven leaders, the pursuit of perfectly optimized forecasts and supply plans can no longer be the end game.

Click here to access the free article, read it and then tell us what you think!

Demand Planning on-site workshop for your Planners, Marketers and Sales Professionals!

This workshop will explain the methodology and process behind accurate demand forecasts and how to effectively use sales and marketing intelligence to arrive at a consensus plan. The focus will be on demand modeling using popular statistical models, the methodology to perform model diagnostics, forecast accuracy measurement and the process to incorporate market intelligence and a brief overview of Sales and Operations Planning process.

This highly informative workshop will be conducted on-site by an experienced Demand Planning expert.  The workshop runs approximately two days and includes extensive materials and excel templates to take away and be used in your work.  Cost is just $8,995.  Learn more...

The Pharma Forecasting Conference addressed a variety of issues and complexities of pharmaceutical industry forecasting head-on and had a number of speeches by practitioners.

The Eyeforpharma Forecasting Summit held at the Back Bay Hilton on October 25-26, 2007 was a mix of pharma specialists and other experienced professionals, talking on topics ranging from uptake curve to promotional forecasting with a pharma perspective.  There was a lot of interest on sessions on predictive markets and how these can be used in corporate forecasting with proper incentive mechanisms.  The collective wisdom of the participants are better than the average of the opinion of each participant was the take away.