Shrinking product life cycles and an unforgiving marketplace have sharply increased the costs of demand management errors. Companies are adopting a new level of demand management technology that better accounts for supply chain variability and can improve gross profit margins.
 
Aberdeen benchmark results show that demand management processes and technologies are being actively re-evaluated by consumer industry companies, with three quarters of them striving to improve their demand management processes.
 
Research finds that 50% of companies say it takes more than one month to sense changes in consumer demand. This is unacceptable in today’s dynamic business environment. There are significant opportunities for companies to gain improvements in top-line sales, profit margin, and inventory levels through improved demand sensing and shaping practices.
 
Aberdeen defines Best in Class companies in demand management as those with product family forecast accuracy of 60% or greater and customer service levels of 90% or greater. Best in Class companies have been able to obtain much greater performance improvements than their peers: they are more than twice as likely to have increased market share, 56% more likely to have improved gross profit margin, and 1.5 times more likely to have improved order fulfillment performance.