8 Reasons Why You Want to Prioritize Demand Forecasting for your Food CPG Supply Chain

Here are the top 8 reasons why you want to prioritize demand forecasting for your food CPG supply chain:

  1. INCREASE SERVICE LEVELS BY IMPROVING COLLABORATION BETWEEN SALES & SUPPLY CHAIN TEAMS. 🍰
    Demand Chain Management (DCM) is the "glue" that helps sales teams anticipate consumer demand for your food products. Accurate demand forecasts are key to DCM.
    Your sales teams will better anticipate demand, resulting in improved supply chain planning.

  2. REDUCE OVERPRODUCTION RESULTING FROM VARIABILITY IN SEASONAL ORDERS OR SPECULATIVE DEMAND. 🍦
    Demand forecasting helps food CPG manufacturers tease out seasonality in demand for food products to align future production and inventory levels. This will result in less stale inventory and food waste.

  3. MINIMIZE STOCK-OUTS FROM INSUFFICIENT INVENTORY. 🛑
    Consumers don't like finding empty shelves when shopping for their favorite foods. Demand forecasting helps ensure that supply will always meet demand.

  4. INCREASE DECISION-MAKING SPEED. 🏃♂️
    Real-time analysis of data, coupled with data automation to reduce manual copy/paste transformations, will lead to more observations and help food companies communicate recommended actions FASTER.
    Demand forecasting is a competitive advantage for agile food CPG supply chains.

  5. IMPROVE COLLABORATION WITH DISTRIBUTORS, VENDORS, AND SUPPLIERS. 📰
    Demand forecasting helps food CPG companies understand production cycles based on order fulfillment rates and depletion history down to the product & facility level.
    Knowing the lead times needed for each supplier or product will help your distributors and vendors know how much inventory they can expect from you. This in turn will help you negotiate better terms and lower your cost of goods sold.

  6. ECOMMERCE SUCCESS 🖥️
    With the push toward Direct-to-Consumer ecommerce sales and same-day food deliveries, demand forecasting is critical to ensuring that your products are at the right warehouse, and delivered at the right time.

  7. ALIGN PRODUCTION PLANS. 🏭
    Informed by strong demand forecasts, accurate demand and inventory plans help you tighten your food production schedule and map growth/production plans to future inventory needs.

  8. SUPPLY CHAIN SUSTAINABILITY. 🌎
    Reduce waste and greenhouse gases, and push toward a more sustainable food supply chain, by optimizing warehouse planning and transport routes. Demand forecasting for supply chains can result in greater sustainability in food manufacturing.

Forecasting is the basis for all strategic & planning decisions in a food manufacturing business with many SKUs and complex supply chains.

But did you know you can build your own forecasting solutions without investing a lot of $?