Distribution Requirement PlanningDistribution Requirement Planning is an exceptionally powerful module that is comprised of five interconnected parts: sales analysis, forecasting, purchase planning, pricing simulation and PSI (purchase, sales and inventory).
Taken together, these parts provide you with all the detailed information you need to analyze sales and other data to plan your purchasing and distribution requirements.
Sales analysis
Sales analysis gives you hundreds of powerful on-line inquiries based on an internal data warehouse. These inquiries are available on-line within seconds and are based on a five-dimensional matrix. The five dimensions are:
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By user-defined customer/channel hierarchy
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By user-defined item hierarchy
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By time
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By user-defined type of sale
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By user-defined item lifecycle
Each inquiry has multiple formats and options that provide a truly powerful on-line analytical facility that is complementary to the facilities provided by Business Intelligence.
Forecasting
Forecasting allows you to determine the demand for your products based on sales history and company policy regarding stock holding and supply ratios. You can set up many such forecast formulae for simulation purposes.
The formula definition is flexible, allowing you to seasonalise forecasts, to omit specific products or product groups from the formulae and to base forecasts on sales or on demand (ie including lost sales). Forecast formulae may be defined relative to the publishing date of a title, to capture accurate title lifecycle movements.
The inbuilt focus forecasting uses these formulae to predict demand and matches the results against actuals from previous periods. It then uses whichever simulation has proved to be the most accurate over the chosen period.
The results can then be used to generate demand.
Pricing simulation
Pricing simulation allows your product managers to perform multiple projections and enables you to make an acceptable margin on titles while keeping them competitive. It allows you to include many factors, such as provisions for rebates, service, advertising, retailer margins, and any other costs you wish to include.
It enables you to simulate different scenarios to find an acceptable RRP that covers your costs and provides acceptable margins to you and your retailers while remaining competitive in the market.
Purchase planning
Purchase planning is used to create purchase plans in bulk from forecasts for items that do not justify individual analysis when placing orders. It is a batch process based on user-defined formulae and business rules. Purchase planning creates a suggested purchase file based on forecasts and/or minimum stock levels and economical order quantities.
The suggested purchase report can be viewed and amended on-line and once it has been reviewed it can be used to automatically create purchase orders or print orders.
PSI
PSI is an invaluable tool to assist your product managers to order the right quantity of the right title at the right time. It is particularly suitable for large value titles where it is important to keep stock at optimum level, such as titles with long lead times or short life cycles.
It can significantly reduce out of stock situations and instances of holding excess stock that must then be remaindered because it is about to become obsolete.
PSI is a fully integrated spreadsheet-like tool used to plan the purchases of individual titles. It displays information from the Pricing Simulation sub-module, forecasts, stock levels, back orders, forward orders, outstanding purchase orders, etc and allows you to define desired stockholding ratios. You can perform a series of ‘what-if’ scenarios to determine the optimum quantities to order and the timing of your order.
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