DLV InsightWhat should I expect?
A demand plan per product you can argue with — and correct.
Planning stock is a bet on a number nobody has written down. Plan too low and you spend your peak out of stock. Plan too high and your cash sits in a warehouse paying storage fees. Most sellers make that call from memory and a spreadsheet that was last correct two seasons ago.
What we do about it
- A demand plan for each product, month by month, one to two years out, built from that product's own sales history rather than a category average.
- The forecasting method is picked per product — a steady seller and one that sells in occasional bursts are not the same problem — and you can see which was chosen and how well it fits.
- Seasonality is yours to adjust: if a month is under-weighted because the product has only lived through one peak, change it before the forecast is generated.
- Every month is editable. Type over a number when you know something the history does not, and an edit on a parent product flows down to its variants. The plan then sits next to your actual sales, so a miss shows up early.
A real moment
The forecast for a seasonal product runs flat through autumn, which nobody in the room believes. The detail explains it: the product has fourteen months of history, so the model has seen its peak exactly once and hedged. The seasonality for those months gets adjusted by hand, the forecast is regenerated, and the plan finally has the shape everyone already knew it had.
A composite scenario, drawn from patterns we see repeatedly — not a named customer's result.