Inventory & Demand Planning
WMS Feature Highlight
Simplify commerce operations with our inventory and demand planning features.
Demand planning allows you to use data from different cross functional areas of your organization (ex. marketing, sales, and purchasing) to make effective inventory purchasing decisions.
Our software tools can help to streamline and automate planning.
Inventory & Demand Planning
Main Feature Benefits
Reduce Missed Opportunities – Avoid backorders and make sure you have enough stock on hand to keep order volume steady. Stock-outs can be costly events that decrease revenue opportunities.
Stock Whats Needed – Keeping too much inventory or products that don’t sell ties up your capital and can kill your business financially. We’ve even seen companies go out of business by overstocking inventory.
Sample Industry Use Cases
General eCommerce
Subscription Services
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Free Up Capital
The closer you can match your stock availability with real-world demand the more capital you will have for other things like customer acquisition, new product lines, hiring strong talent, and other important parts of your business.
Demand planning software helps you plan your inventory effectively which helps reduce the opportunity cost of sinking all your available cash flow into inventory that doesn’t sell through very quickly. This process is simplified using our OMS.
Improve Customer Experience
There are two major customer experience issues that many companies with poor demand planning run into.
The first being stock-outs or backorders where you will need to let your customer know what they ordered isn’t actually available. The second is having a customer ready to buy your product but an out of stock on your website.
These problems are both easily solved by effective demand planning.
Eliminate Overstock
Overstock not to be confused with the popular website overstock.com is inventory that sits around with no one to buy them.
Overstock.com and Groupon (both of which we integrate with) actually built their businesses initially helping businesses liquidate this inventory.
Of course overstock inventory gets sold off usually at a clearance rate which hurts your profits but is 100% preventable with good demand planning.
SKUs / Products & Users allowed
Yearly value of orders shipped
Innovating in commerce systems
Free Consultation
Book time with a solutions engineer to see if our comprehensive commerce platform is a fit.
Common Questions
Inventory and demand planning is an important part of daily operation so we have tried to make it as easy as possible in our order management system (OMS). Here are some common questions that our users have had when getting started.
What is demand planning process?
Demand planning as a process is taking data from multiple sources like sales or order history, current back-ordered stock, future promotions, external channel demand, etc. Then using said information to try and predict what inventory demand would be in the future.
While it’s not a perfect science and sometimes unexpected events can throw a wrench in your forecast. Typically the more data points you can feed your model the more accurate it will be over time.
Advanced order management and warehouse management systems like Shipedge store many of these data points and could even integrate with external data sources to improve the forecasting process.
What is the difference between demand planning and forecasting?
Demand forecasting is the process of trying to get an accurate picture of future demand for a product.
Demand planning is the use of your demand forecast to try and plan inventory in terms of purchasing, inventory allocation by channel, reserve stock, and other inventory impacting considerations.
What are the elements of demand planning?
There are several elements that can influence your demand planning model and typically the more relevant data points you are able to feed into the model the more accurate it becomes.
- Product usage or sell-through rate.
- Expected spikes in demand.
- External trends and factors.
Simplifying digital commerce with powerful solutions
Book a Free Consultation with a Solutions Engineer
Check our open calendar after you hit submit to find a time that works for your team.
Every organization is different, so a solutions engineer will work with you to identify your biggest challenges and the best possible solutions to overcome those challenges.
