Aspen Collaborative Demand Manager™
A world-class, enterprise solution for forecasting market demand
Aspen Collaborative Demand Manager synergistically addresses two primary business functions: demand planning and collaborative forecasting. The resultant consensus demand plan is a comprehensive and accurate forecast of market demand that acts as a primary input into downstream functions. Aspen Collaborative Demand Manager is a core element of AspenTech’s aspenONE® Supply Chain applications.
Features
- Collaborative Forecasting: Enables web-based collaboration with internal and external stakeholders to improve demand forecast quality. Forecast inputs from marketing, sales, analysts, and planners can store their own inputs and compare against the consensus.
- History Management: Provides superior data conditioning tools to identify statistical outliers as well as map and re-align history to a “current view” of the business in order to better project the desired demand pattern. For petroleum customers, this means re-aligning terminal liftings history to current commodity and customer names to account for formulation changes
- Understand Sales Trends: Provides ability to view/graph history with powerful and flexible data aggregation and “slice-and-dice” capability. View sales history and forecasts based on high-volume products and customers. Prioritize forecast collaboration based on high-volume and most difficult to statistically forecast.
- Sales & Operations Planning Tools: A world-class statistical forecasting engine generates a forecast using embedded forecasting models, as well as the “optimal” algorithm. Supports an integrated S&OP process with constrained forecasts communicated to Production Schedulers, Distribution Schedulers, and Marketing.
- What-if Analysis: Executes demand scenarios such as family-level increase in sales of a certain percentage and evaluates the impact on the business as a whole.
- Demand Analytics: Provides web-based summary and detailed level demand management reports to the enterprise. Pre-configured and user-defined reports support the business needs.
- Demand Manager Exceptions: Enables the Demand Manager user to quickly link from a forecast exception to view the detailed time series related to the exception.
- EnterpriseScale Deployment: Supports enterprise-wide connectivity and management of data models. Inter-application integration supported by a common data model. Robust data exchange with ERP and other data systems through Aspen Supply Chain Connect.
Benefits
- Improved forecast alignment: Use the built-in flexible data model and aggregation techniques to better align and reconcile operational demand forecasts, as well as financial and strategic forecasts. Decrease future demand uncertainty by uncovering root causes of demand variations using powerful data analysis tools.
- Optimal forecasts: Speed the creation of optimal forecasts using 11 different forecast models with automatic optimal selection of method and parameters based on best-fit statistics.
- Improved inventory position: Right sizes inventories by generating accurate demand forecasts based on statistical methods augmented with real-time collaborative data.
- Improved visibility, speed, and flexibility: Enables forecast exceptions to be quickly identified, analyzed, and adjusted to provide more accurate forecasts efficiently. Forecast elements can be aggregated and disaggregated to provide the detail required for any analytical requirements.