In the rapidly evolving landscape of supply chain management, precision, agility, and resilience are the keys to success. A recent survey of demand planners‘ concerns and day-to-day experiences sheds light on the challenges faced by planning teams today and highlights the pressing need for innovative solutions to solve for them. Let’s delve into the key insights from the survey and explore how Cognitive Demand Planning is reshaping the future of demand planning.

Demand Planners Today Are Struggling With Solutions That Have Reached Accuracy and Effectiveness Plateaus

In today’s competitive business environment, accurate demand forecasting is non-negotiable. Businesses rely on these forecasts to make informed decisions about production, inventory and distribution, which is why it’s no surprise that 63% of respondents emphasized the critical importance of precise predictions. Unfortunately, due to the ineffectiveness of traditional demand planning tools, many planners find themselves working outside their standard applications, which can lead to inefficiencies and data discrepancies. In fact, 60% of respondents indicated the need to work outside enterprise systems, often using tools like Excel and multiple data sources, and 50% of respondents highlighted the challenge of modeling various influencing factors in planning, such as weather, events and promotions.

While this approach may have sufficed in the past, we are living in a new era of perpetual disruptions. According to a recent Gartner survey, 68% of supply chain execs feel they’re constantly responding to high-impact disruptions and just about the same number said they don’t even have time to recover before the next one hits. This relentless uncertainly has made manual scenario planning no longer a viable alternative, especially when creating, running and evaluating scenario plans manually is so time consuming and tedious, which is why 50% of respondents expressed concerns about the time-consuming nature of scenario planning. Overall, time is of the essence when it comes to scenario planning and traditional methods are simply falling short.

It’s no wonder that planners are burnt out and why many organizations are facing labor shortages despite more mobile workforces, a continuing shift towards online channels and ever-expanding networks. According to the survey, 60% of respondents shared concerns about overworked, stressed-out planners.

Cognitive Demand Is a Game-Changing Solution With Real-Time Simulations and AI-Driven Insights To Empower More Agile Decision-Making

Blue Yonder’s Cognitive Demand Planning solution enables businesses to respond swiftly and confidently to changing market dynamics. By consolidating data sources and providing a user-friendly interface, it enhances overall efficiency and accuracy. With autonomous mix and match capabilities, Blue Yonder will automatically choose the best combination of our statistical forecasts, patented algorithms, and your machine learning (ML) to apply to scenario planning, ensuring you achieve the highest possible forecast accuracy and stay ahead of the curve.

Rather than manually poring over all the different options available to you, you just have to set the parameters, and we take care of the rest. Cognitive Demand Planning then delivers real-time simulations of complex scenarios that factor in your parameters and external data like weather patterns, events, and promotional activities, as well as industry-specific causals, providing businesses with a holistic view of market influencers.

While we have included standard causals out of the box, we know that every business is unique. That’s why we empower customers to add their own external causals, whether from internal enterprise data or by tapping into the Snowflake data marketplace. And beyond just bringing your own data, we also enable customers to bring their own ML. With cognitive planning, you can extend Blue Yonder’s ML or create your own, then test it and deploy it at production scale. We have no-code, low-code and pro-code options available for users with easy to use and familiar design environments — so while your developers will love it, you don’t have to be an experienced data scientist to use it.    

And Blue Yonder Orchestrator, our generative AI, is helping to onboard the next generation of demand planners. Blue Yonder is bringing together generative AI, natural language capabilities and industry-leading supply chain solvers to surface insights faster in everyday language to predict and guide decision-making, so even the most junior planner can make expert-level decisions.

Don’t Wait To Unlock Your Team’s Untapped Potential. The Time Is Now.

Demand planners play a pivotal role in supply chain management. However, increasing pressures and workloads are leading to stress and burnout. Cognitive Demand Planning is designed with demand planners in mind. By delivering data-driven insights at their fingertips, optimizing processes, and automating repetitive tasks, it reduces the burden on planners, allowing them to focus on strategic decision-making and creativity.

These survey results underline the transformative potential of Cognitive Demand Planning. By addressing the core challenges faced by businesses today, it paves the way for a future where demand forecasting and planning are not only precise and efficient but also adaptive and resilient. Embrace the power of Cognitive Demand Planning and revolutionize your supply chain management today.