Do you want to implement a more demand-driven sales and operations planning process? Do you want to incorporate emerging best practices such as more precise forecasts, collaboration, and postponement strategies? Do you need to consolidate disparate sources of demand information into a central demand hub to drive consensus forecasts and make better decisions? Oracle Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning solution enables you to implement a comprehensive sales and operations planning process that profitably balances demand, supply, and budgets.

Download the Oracle® Demantra Real-Time and Sales Operations Planning Datasheet

Implement the Next Generation Sales and Operations Planning Process

Oracle® Demantra Real Time Sales and Operations Planning extends demand-driven adaptive planning across your company and uniquely enables a truly best-in-class sales and operations planning process. It enables you to implement a comprehensive sales and operations planning process that balances demand and supply around a one-number forecast to drive operational excellence and achieve profitability goals. 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. You can start quickly by leveraging best practice templates, yet you can easily configure the tool to follow your unique business processes. Tight integration with Oracle® Demantra Demand Management and other Oracle® Advanced Planning products enables you to rapidly sense, shape, and respond to demand starting with a more accurate prediction of demand, shaping it for profitability, profitably balancing your supply demand and budgets, and measuring performance improvements continuously.

Demantra Real-Time Sales & Operations Planning Features:

• Superior demand management—provides sense, shape, and response capabilities to support your sales & operations planning process with accurate forecasts that all departments can agree on
• Configurable planning platform—adapts to company business processes
• Workflow-driven collaborative planning—improves responsiveness to changes in demand and supply
• A single source of information—improves decision-making
• Top-down bottom-up planning—validates business plans and identifies potential gaps
• Demand shaping capabilities—help you select the right promotions and marketing programs to close the gaps

Key Benefits:

• Move from a periodic reactive process to a real time proactive process
• Start quickly with best practice templates and easily adapt to your business process
• Sense, shape, and respond to demand
• Managers are back in control
• Incremental deployment – get benefits quickly without the loss of integration
• Demand and supply review
• Constraint analysis based on return on investment
• Consensus demand planning
• Financial gap analysis
• Inventory postponement strategies
• Sales forecasting
• Attribute-based new product introductions
• Shape demand with marketing and promotion plans
• Top-down and bottom-up plan validation
• Automated exception reporting
• Role-based, configurable, spreadsheet-like worksheets
• Support for planning in dollars, cases and units with all conversions
• Workflow-based collaboration
• Configurable report builder
• Easy-to-use and highly configurable
• Open standards based connectivity to external or legacy systems
• Rapid implementation for faster time to benefit and greater return on investment

Move From A Periodic Reactive Process To A Real-Time Proactive Process

The first step in moving to a real time sales and operations process is capturing all demand and supply data real time, much closer to the point of consumption and at a very granular level, and then consolidating it in a central and secure repository. The repository can be configured and extended easily as it is completely meta-data driven and supports user-defined dimensions and hierarchies. In addition, its open architecture enables you to bring in data via spreadsheets, XML, EDI, and portal self-service front-ends. Once you bring all the data together, the next step is enabling and automating the collaboration needed to bring everyone to consensus. Oracle® Demantra Real Time Sales and Operations Planning achieves this for all the participants of the process by providing them with tailored worksheets, with security to control what they can see and edit, in a simple, flexible, an intuitive format with any data at any level of aggregation they need to perform their tasks. Data can come in and be edited at any level and automatic aggregation and allocation rationalize the data to all levels so you can make adjustments top down, bottom up, or middle out. This enables you to combine top-down business planning with precise bottom-up planning. Deriving the baseline consensus plan can be automated and based on weighting the inputs from various groups.

Interactive simulation and analysis

Oracle® Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning supports a continuous simulation and analysis process to simulate demand and supply strategies, analyze multiple business scenarios, achieve consensus on plans through internal collaboration, generate and analyze exceptions, and use workflow to automate process. Comprehensive audit trail is provided for documenting all decisions, assumptions, changes, and action items arising during the process and the entire process can be automated with workflow that is tailorable to your unique process or approval hierarchy. For example, you can send worksheets to colleagues complete with notes and action items, workflow can automatically assign tasks and action items.

Start quickly with best practice templates and easily adapt to your business

Oracle® Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning gets you started quickly by providing seeded data streams, metrics, templates, worksheets, and workflows that represent a typical best practice process as a starting point. It is however flexible enough to allow you to fine tune the process to conform precisely to your unique business processes. You can quickly configure the user interface and leverage the task oriented dashboards with key performance indicators to monitor performance, view notifications of assigned tasks, shared information, or exceptions that require attention, and define favorites such as links to the worksheets where most work is performed. The worksheets themselves provide spreadsheet like interaction, yet in a secure and scalable enterprise system.

Sense, Shape and Respond to Demand

One key element of the S&OP process is the prediction of future demand. Oracle® Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning builds on Oracle® Demantra Demand Management to enable you to start with a more accurate and precise estimate of demand. It enables you to sense demand signals real time, and automate the consensus forecasting process including bringing your customers into the process. You can engage customers directly and provide secure access to customers and automate collaboration. It also enables moving from simply reacting demand to actively shaping demand for profitability The Oracle® Demantra Demand Management forecasting engine generates highly accurate forecasts that provide a more accurate starting point for the consensus process. Oracle® Demantra Demand Management provides best in class statistical forecasting, but without requiring you to have a statistical background to use it. You can think of it as having a “PhD in a box” with the complexity hidden from most users, but still providing the ability for advanced users to fine tune the process as desired.

Shape Demand to Improve Revenue with Promotion Planning

With the optional Oracle® Demantra Advanced Forecasting and Demand Modeling, Oracle® Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning can extensively manage the impact of events and promotions. The sophisticated promotion-modeling engine generates lift factors from historical data from past events to predict the impact of future promotions and marketing programs. Lifts are decomposed to identify both positive and negative cannibalization effects, enabling you to model the impact on other related products. Events can be assigned along any dimension in your demand plan. Oracle® Demantra Demand Management helps you shape demand with marketing programs and promotions with greater predictability. Promotion forecasts consider local differences, seasonality, and other causal factors for that unique period in time.

Also important in actively shaping demand is incorporating product portfolio planning in the sales and operations planning process and deciding on the timing of product introduction and phase outs based on revenue and profitability implications. Oracle® Demantra Demand Management enables you to automatically identify products that have similar characteristics to a new product to be introduced, identify the lifecycle shape of the existing products and other factors like outliers in the history data, and then accurately forecast the demand of the new product to be introduced.

Increase Profitability by Better Balancing Demand, Supply, and Budgets

As you arrive at a consensus forecast, the demand needs to be balanced with supply in a way that profits are maximized and financial targets are met. Perhaps the most important difference in the best practice process enabled by Oracle and a typical sales and operations planning process is enabling the demand review and the supply review to happen concurrently and interactively. This enables you to profitably balance your supply, demand, and budgets.
Oracle® Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning integrates with the other Oracle® Advanced Planning products to interactively evaluate demand scenarios and supply constraints. It is also open for bringing in supply and capacity information from other planning and ERP applications. Seeded supply streams and worksheets provide templates for comparing the unconstrained consensus forecast with supply, performing rough cut capacity planning, and collaborating on how to allocate constrained supply to demand.

Combine Strategic Decisions with Real-Time Sensing, Shaping, and Responding

All of the interactive demand, supply, and product planning come together in the management review process. Oracle® Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning enables you to easily bring together all of the inputs and proposed plans, and provides the framework for developing the typical exhibits used in the decision making process in the management review meeting. It provides the ability to track all of the assumptions that went into the plan and an audit trail of the adjustments that were made. The ad-hoc reporting support allow you to present data easily in whatever format is desired, and also provides both pre-defined and flexible metrics to measure performance and drive continuous improvement.

Enforce Decisions and Monitor Performance for Accountability

The last, and maybe most important, area where Oracle® Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning uniquely enables a better process is in the direct tight integration of sales and operations planning with other planning processes and execution to enforce sales and operations planning decisions by driving tactical decisions and enforcing accountability with integrated performance management. An integrated solution enables seamless synchronization between strategic, tactical, and operational plans. Examples that illustrate this idea include enforcing allocation decisions made during the sales and operations planning process when promising orders using allocated available to promise or driving supply chain planning directly with the officially approved forecast, supply plan, as well as safety stock and service level targets approved during the sales and operations planning process. One way to think of sales and operations planning is as the steering wheel allowing you to control and manage all aspects of the business. This is enabled by direct connection to all other aspects of planning which in turn drives directly to execution. And the final aspect that truly closes the loop is integrated performance management to continually monitor and react in real time and to assign and ensure accountability to execute the sales and operations planning decisions.

Put Managers Back in Control

Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning solution is about regaining control over your enterprise systems and, ultimately, the business itself. It harnesses the tremendous wealth of information locked inside your enterprise resource planning systems, enabling your managers to steer the business toward its financial goals rather than react to reports.

Quickly Add Functionality with a Fully Integrated Planning Solution

Oracle® Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning is part of the Oracle® Advanced Planning solution and provides synergy when used with other Oracle® Advanced Planning products. For example, Oracle® Demantra Demand Management provides both a consensus demand forecast and a measure of forecast error for calculation of forecast accuracy. Oracle® Advanced Supply Chain Planning provides constrained supply plan that is used to balance the demand picture. Allocation decisions made in the S&OP process can be defined and enforced via Oracle® Global Order Promising. Inventory budgets determined in the S&OP process can be set as constraints in Oracle® Inventory Optimization.

As part of the Oracle® Advanced Planning solution, Oracle® Demantra Real-Time Sales and Operations Planning shares a common infrastructure and data model, which means there is no redundant setup or modeling of your supply chain. Each additional module you deploy requires only the incremental setup required to use the unique capabilities of the product, enabling you to quickly add functionality at low cost.

Oracle® Advanced Planning seamlessly operates with the other Oracle E-Business Suite components, such as order fulfillment, manufacturing, procurement, warehouse management, sales, marketing, enterprise planning and budgeting, and supply chain intelligence, to provide the best possible solution to manage your extended supply chains.