Holistic and Collaborative Demand Forecasting Process

Demand forecasting being the leading activity of the process of collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment has to provide the planning base for drafting the demand plans to be compromised and achieved through the collaborative efforts of all the demand network stakeholders. This paper develops a conceptual framework of demand forecasting process to specify and identify the forecast items for forecast generation with a holistic and collaborative approach to ensure information about future customer requirements to be adequate and relevant for directing the approaching planning activities. Firstly, the procedure will postulate a comprehensive range of forecast granularity specifications characterized with the combinations of the forecasting time horizon, product grouping, and geographic dimension parameters. Secondly, the various, individually characterized, demand items will be related to form chains of aggregate and disaggregate proposed forecast items. Then, with exploratory time series analysis and consensus approach, only those items which forecasts are relevant to the planning decisions of the various functional organizations will be addressed and recommended for forecast output development.