For businesses to achieve best-in-class inventory management, they must maintain the right amount of inventory to effectively meet anticipated demand. Companies unable to maintain this delicate balance end up carrying too much inventory and spending precious dollars on expedited or emergency shipments and unplanned replenishment. Because of these consequences, companies are constantly trying to improve inventory management through demand planning models that try to predict the “right” balance of inventory.

Unfortunately for most organisations, this process relies on spreadsheets and manual inputs from sales teams. The manual nature of this process results in not only inaccurate forecasts, but forecasts that aren’t timely. The process itself can be costly, consuming both time and resources that could be better spent understanding how to leverage the results.

Oracle NetSuite’s new Demand Planning module helps solve these challenges by enabling purchasing and inventory managers to determine the demand projection of items in the coming months based on historical data and trends or sales forecast information. It delivers the insights that managers need to plan inventory accordingly, and create purchase and work orders to meet anticipated demand.