What is demand planning software?
Planning and forecasting your business operations is essential to making sure your business runs smoothly. Without a plan, your company could go under if you don't anticipate sales volume, purchase costs, production schedules, and any other variables that could impact your company's bottom line. Demand planning software can help you forecast your sales and operations, and plan for any changes that could impact your company's financials. It can also help you identify opportunities to improve your business operations.
5 Best Demand Planning Software Solutions for Your Fast Casual Business
What is Demand Planning?
Demand planning is a key part of supply chain management that involves forecasting future demand to ensure that the necessary resources are available when needed. The goal is to minimize costs while maximizing customer satisfaction by having the right products or services available when and where they are needed. To do this, restaurant businesses need to consider various factors, such as historical data on sales, market trends, seasonality, and promotional activities.
Demand planning is a constant process of estimating future demand and planning supply, operations and workforce management according to these forecasts. It is the process of ensuring that your supply chain planning is robust enough to enable you to introduce the right kind of new products, get rid of excess inventory, and stock up for future needs.
Why is Demand Planning Crucial to Supply Chain Planning?
Demand planning or demand management is a fundamental part of supply chain planning as it helps you plan ahead for your supplies. Imagine you have your Supply Chain ready, vendors in place, but you don't have an estimate of what inventory items should be ordered or what kind of sales to expect over the next couple of weeks. Your entire supply chain planning and inventory planning will fail if you don't have a firm handle on your future demand.
Having an accurate demand forecast is crucial to effective supply chain planning. If a company does not have a good handle on what its future sales will be, it will not be able to produce the correct amount of items to meet customer demand. This can lead to backorders and lost sales, which can damage a restaurant's reputation and bottom line.
An effective demand planning process considers all relevant internal and external factors that could affect future sales (such as changes in the economy, new product launches, etc.) and comes up with a consensus forecast that can be used by the entire organization. This ensures that everyone is working off of the same information. This decreases the risk of nasty surprises further down the line.
Managing your inventory is a hassle. You need to make sure that you have the right amount of stock, but if you overstock too much, then you’ll end up with a lot of wasted money.
To be successful in this business, you need to know how to manage your inventory and be able to predict what will sell best.
Top 5 Demand Planning Software SolutionsNo. 1 - Zip Forecasting
Zip Forecasting is a forecasting and planning software specifically designed for restaurants. From anticipating future demand to demand planning, you can trust it to automate all your operations planning with absolute accuracy. Zip Forecasting offers real time forecasts and helps you tweak your operations and inventory according to your immediate needs.
With Zip Forecasting's toolkit, you can reduce food costs by only ordering what's needed, without wasting money on excess or unwanted supplies. This will optimize your inventory management and guarantee profitability. You can also analyze your historical data, sales reports, and inventory usage data to gain actionable insights into your business operation. Moreover, when you have an automated demand planner at your disposal, you can manage your workforce better, avoiding overstaffing on lean days and reducing labor costs.
Zip Forecasting can be purchased from Hubworks, a dedicated app store for the restaurant industry.
Demand Planning Software No. 2 - Intuendi
Intuendi is a cloud based demand planning and forecasting software that works especially well for small- and medium-size food businesses. It specializes in demand planning and inventory optimization with its tools that use artificial intelligence and machine learning to produce accurate forecasts. This omni-channel planning software can help you manage inventory and orders across channels and recommends actions you can undertake to maximize sales.
Intuendi's tools also take into account factors such as seasonality, marketing efforts, calendar events, and so on when drawing up a demand forecast. From data collection to data processing and management, this forecasting software automates much of the data work of a restaurant and helps it plug losses and improve efficiency.
Demand Planning Software No. 3 - PredictHQ
PredictHQ is a demand forecasting solution that uses the historical data of a business, and considers external and internal factors that may impact sales, to come up with accurate forecasts. The demand intelligence tools used by PredictHQ measure the impact of events, festivals, school holidays, sports seasons and so on, to understand how these can affect a business and its sales. From seasonal trends to market upheavals, economic conditions and calendar events, you can take into account various conditions to obtain accurate forecasting results. PredictHQ tracks 19 different kinds of events to gauge how these might affect sales.
Armed with its demand plans, you can achieve inventory optimization, better Order Management, and sharper employee scheduling. Moreover, PredictHQ promises to work not only for food businesses, but all kinds of retail establishments such as supermarkets and grocery stores and even travel and transport businesses.
Managing your inventory and sales data is difficult, it’s hard to stay on top of all the moving pieces.
What if you could have a software that would do all the work for you?
Demand Planning Software No. 4 - Digitory
Digitory is another great demand planning and forecasting software that helps businesses with efficient employee and inventory management. Its machine learning and artificial intelligence tools promise profitability, cost reduction and zero wastage, along with accurate inventory forecasting, production planning and sales forecasting. It also helps you identify sales patterns and trends so that inventory optimization is made easy.
Digitory works well for restaurants, bars, breweries and cloud kitchens. The company also offers other restaurant management software solutions for inventory management, point of sale, and so on.
Demand Planning Software No. 5 - Alloy
Alloy is a food tech solution that extracts the historical data from your point of sale and inventory systems to help you better understand your restaurant's sales patterns and future demand.
This POS-driven software prepares reliable forecast models for restaurants to act upon, and ensures high customer satisfaction by accurately anticipating demand. Alloy produces on-point forecasts in real timean invaluable feature for food businesses operating in today's highly competitive food service industry.
You want to grow your business but you don’t have the time or resources to do so.
You need a way to manage your inventory and customer data without the hassle of multiple software programs.