Demand Forecasting Best Practices

4 Collaboration: data sharing and planning alignment

As discussed in the previous chapter, collecting demand data is key to proper demand forecasting but especially challenging. In this chapter, we will discuss how you can collaborate with your clients to improve your data quality and directly look into the demand they are facing from their customers.

4.1 How supply chains distort demand information

Let’s imagine a simplistic supply chain with a manufacturer, a retailer, and end consumers, as illustrated in figure 4.1. This is called a two-echelons supply chain because we have two stages (the manufacturer and the retailer).

Figure 4.1 Simple ...