There have been great gains in many companies in terms of sales and operations planning, integrated business planning, or whatever term is used. That has led to greater alignment across the business, everyone working off a single forecast, and other improvements.

Yet, of course, demand is fickle, and for that and other reasons what companies expect to happen in the business plan often is not achieved.

What if a company had a better advanced warning system that could alert it earlier about such a gap between the plan and what was going to occur, so that it could take action earlier to close that gap?

That's exactly what one major consumer packaged goods company did in recent years, as explained earlier this week in a Videocast on our Supply Chain Television Channel by Andre Martin of JDA Software on that company's innovative new Flowcasting solution. The company used the Flowcasting tools  - which forecast every item every day in every retail store - to compare what Flowcasting said was going to happen at one very large retail account versus the revenue plan for that customer.

As can be seen in the graphic below, the initial analysis showed a significant gap between the business plan and the more granular forecast for that customer.

By having that insight much earlier and more clearly than they had ever had before, the company was able to take the data to the account and jointly work to close that revenue gap. While the gap was not completely eliminated, the delta became much smaller than it would have been otherwise, Martin said.

You can here that story and much more on the full broadcast, which can be found here: Understanding Breakthrough Flowcasting Technology.

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