Most consumer-goods sales forces are overwhelmed trying to create and maintain accurate and up-to-date account forecasts. Using Oracle® Demantra Predictive Trade Planning and Oracle® Trade Promotion Optimization, employees in your sales, marketing, finance, and supply chain organization can leverage powerful forecast analytics and enterprise collaboration capabilities and share a common understanding of demand and the impact of promotions.

Download the Oracle® Demantra Predictive Trade Planning and Optimization Datasheet

Overview

Faced with escalating trade spending, leading companies are rethinking their approach to trade promotion management software. Most of the existing systems focus on the transactional aspects of promotions and sales incentives. As a result, they often do a good job of streamlining administration, but they do little to address key strategic issues such as promotion effectiveness, on-shelf availability, category growth, and customer profitability.

Oracle Demantra Predictive Trade Planning combined with Oracle Demantra Trade Promotion Optimization is the first trade promotion planning solution architected from the ground up on an analytics platform that addresses both transactional and strategic trade challenges. Combined, they provide robust trade promotion and account planning, sales forecasting, and promotion optimization capabilities. Using Demantra’s trade planning solution, companies’ industry sales teams can control spending, exceed sales targets, and maximize promotion return on investment (ROI).

Demantra Predictive Trade Planning and Optimization Features:

• Analyze sales history with advanced data mining technology to provide an understanding of which promotion tactics shape demand
• Address both transactional and strategic trade challenges
• Automate the process of volume planning on an ongoing basis and provide accurate and up-to-date projections of accrual-based budgets and anticipated spending levels
• Close the loop of trade promotion management by tracking and resolving deductions and other settlement methods common in the consumer goods industry
• Use retailer point-of-sale and syndicated data to measure, predict, and optimize promotion lift, taking into account effects such as cannibalization and consumer stockpiling
• Mine multiple sources of internal, agency, syndicated, and point-of-sale data to learn which marketing tactics work best
• Simulate different scenarios and use optimization technology to determine which marketing tactics will yield maximum return on investment
• Dynamic Open Link supports MS Excel web queries

Key Benefits

• Increased sales with reduced promotions spending
• Improved service levels, reduced inventory levels, and lower distribution costs as a result of more accurate account volume forecasts
• Increased profitability due to more efficient and effective promotions
• Improved fact-based selling through better insights
• Increased promotion sell-in using category management
• Reduced deduction write-offs and improved cash flow
• Decreased time spent administering promotions and resolving deductions and more time spent selling
• Incremental deployment – get benefits quickly without the loss of integration

Collaboratively manage all funds, sales, and account planning

Oracle® Demantra Predictive Trade Planning provides a comprehensive sales and account planning environment that enables account managers to manage all routine sales forecasting and account planning activities from a single screen. Using a powerful, multi-panel worksheet, sales representatives can keep tabs on sales performance and quotas, plan promotion events, and track the progress of current and past events.

Based on a powerful, worksheet-style user interface, Oracle Demantra Predictive Trade Planning enables you to eliminate the many individual spreadsheets often in use in sales departments today. Supporting most common spreadsheet capabilities, it runs directly against an enterprise database, ensuring all sales data is continuously updated. Customers have successfully eliminated hundreds of spreadsheets from their trade promotion management process, while adding secured, global data access. In addition, an offline capability empowers field personnel to continue to work on their promotion plans, while working remote, and automatically sync up when reconnected.

Configured to meet the needs of each user or role, the Demantra Predictive Trade Planning Collaboration Workbench serves as the hub of the collaboration. It organizes the user’s worksheets, identifies required tasks sent by other users or automatically generated through exception management, and provides quick access to personalized key performance indicators.

Continuous fund management

Tight budgets and increasing compliance demands require rigorous budget processes. Oracle Demantra Predictive Trade Planning combines powerful budget allocation with robust trade-fund execution capabilities for market development programs, business development funds, slotting, and other accrual or promotional activities. Organizations can control discretionary spending dollars by designating specific product, brand, promotion group, and customer allocations, ensuring that promotional funds are used as intended.

Integrated analytics with baseline forecast and lift calculations

Oracle Demantra Predictive Trade Planning provides a full complement of standard reports to track account planning and trade promotion status. Side-by-side comparisons make it easy for account managers to compare promotion alternatives. Manufacturer and retailer profitability reports ensure that the costs and benefits of all events are visible. A user-configurable report and worksheet designer lets users quickly assemble their own reports or personalize standard reports.

At its core, Demantra Predictive Trade Planning is a sales and promotion planning system that enables account managers to develop a highly accurate, account-level sales forecast and event plan by simply going through their daily sales planning activities. A single planning environment provides visibility to all the information that an account manager needs on a daily basis to make the most profitable decisions. Year-to-date sales data, quota status, account profitability, and the status of all promotions are available in one place. A promotion planning “sandbox” provides visibility to all past and current promotions and “what-if” scenario planning for future promotions. A single-click approval of a new promotion updates the baseline sales forecast predicted incremental volume, and is automatically synchronized with the demand plan.

Optional approval and notifications can be added by adjusting workflows. Also, the predicted impact on the trade-fund budgets and manufacturer and retailer profitability projections are available immediately. All account-level information is continuously aggregated and visible to sales management at any time.

Promotion optimization maximizes the ROI on promotions

With Oracle Demantra Trade Promotion Optimization, sales organizations can go beyond volume forecasting and implement best business practices such as advanced promotion evaluation, simulation, and optimization. Account managers can measure and predict base sales, net lift, and indirect effects such as cannibalization and consumer pantry loading. Oracle Demantra Trade Promotion Optimization can take advantage of retailer point-of-sale (POS) and syndicated data to measure, predict, and optimize promotion lift, taking into account effects such as cannibalization and pantry loading. It also automates the process of promotion analysis as it can be done on-the-fly at the level of individual products and accounts. With this capability, account managers and trade marketers can be more effective and efficient with trade funds while providing precision forecasts to the entire company.

True optimization

To maximize promotion effectiveness, Oracle Demantra Trade Promotion Optimization goes beyond what-if scenario planning optimization technology that considers the nearly infinite number of promotion scenarios and recommends the best promotions to run. Users can select from various optimization objectives including maximize revenue, maximize volume, or maximize profits. The optimization engine is designed to stay within reasonable bounds based on past history. The engine can optimize a single event, or be used to suggest an entire promotion calendar for an account.

Integrate with Oracle® Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning

Oracle Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning uniquely enables a truly best in class process. It starts with moving from a reactive periodic process with separate and disconnected reviews of demand, supply, and products to a combined collaborative real-time process. It enables you to rapidly sense, shape, and respond to demand starting with a more accurate prediction of demand, shaping it for profitability, and profitably balancing your supply demand and budgets.
Oracle Demantra Predictive Trade Planning and Oracle Demantra Trade Promotion Optimization work hand in hand with Oracle Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning to profitably shape demand through promotions and sales incentives.

Oracle Demantra Predictive Trade Planning is built on a collaborative planning platform that ensures the sales forecasts and event plans developed by sales are synchronized across Marketing,Finance, Manufacturing, and Supply Chain. Using a single (data) source of truth, departments can contribute their insights to a one-number plan using the planning hierarchies and units with which they already are familiar. This means that demand plans are always in sync with promotion plans because manufacturing and supply chain are aware of sales and marketing activities. Workflow-driven exception management automatically identifies plan or demand changes that may create potential problems and routes them to the correct resource for resolution.

Realize additional business value through out-of-the-box integration

Oracle Demantra Predictive Trade Planning is integrated to Oracle® Siebel CRM for Foundational TPM and Oracle JD Edwards products and supports Oracle® Fusion Middleware and Database. These integrations provide out-of-the-box integration of planning hierarchies into Demantra and baseline promotional volume and incremental lift back to JD Edwards and Siebel CRM, providing fast time-to-value for customers.

Proven, secure, scalable, and reliable component architecture

Oracle® Demantra’s unique database-centric architecture enables companies to operate business operations, 24 x 7. First, by storing all trade promotion planning information in the database, Oracle® Demantra leverages the built-in capabilities for locking, hot backup and recovery. Second, by supporting a distributed architecture, you can deploy the Oracle Demantra solution as a component against multiple ERP source systems.

Incremental deployment – Get benefits quickly

You can deploy all Oracle Demantra products incrementally, enabling you to start with a smaller planning footprint quickly, while still leveraging the tight integration once all components are operational. In addition, you can expand the Demantra footprint towards the broader Oracle Value Chain Planning solution to achieve additional benefits.

Oracle Value Chain Planning — A Complete Solution

Oracle’s Value Chain Planning solution enables companies to efficiently design, plan, and service their value chains from ‘factory to shelf’. Its componentized architecture enables you to start with any product and expand to other areas at any point in time. For example, you can decide to start with improvements to your demand management process because you have a forecast accuracy problem, and then implement constrained supply planning or a sales and operations planning process. The Oracle Value Chain Planning architecture leverages the scalability and security of Oracle’s RDBMS and Fusion Middleware technology and can be deployed as a single instance withOracle E-Business Suite, or integrated with other systems. Whether you implement one module or the entire product solution, Oracle’s Value Chain Planning solution enables you to share unified supply chain planning information across the enterprise so you can make smarter decisions faster, with better information.