The client has manufacturing plants in the US, Japan and China. Every week sales offices located in the US, Europe, China, Japan, Canada and Latin America send in weekly demand forecasts to these factories.

The Marketing and Sales Group uses spreadsheets called Marketing Inventory Plan (MIP) for demand forecasting and planning. MIP was created with inputs from sales orders, dealer demand, product inventory, factory’s production schedule and sales data. The Marketing Inventory Plan (MIP) was sent to the factories on a weekly basis. The factories used this data not only create a manufacturing production schedule but as a basis for the factory’s procurement and inventory level decisions. The factories in turn sent the Marketing Group a production plan called Actual Production Plan - APP.

These manually created spreadsheets were error prone, data inconsistent, time consuming and required frequent manual intervention on business critical data. Miscalculation in forecasting demand could result in an excess or shortage of supply chain inventory. This would lead to failure in on-time delivery to customers and cause major losses to the client.

Users of the existing demand forecasting and planning system also had to deal with recurring problems/issues such as missing and inaccurate data, EDI, inefficiencies due to lack of functionality, unstable interfaces to external data sources, inconsistent look and feel, scalability issues, unstable systems and reporting inconsistencies. All this resulted into high maintenance cost, performance degradation and reduced efficiencies. Competitive pressures were also driving the client to create processes to respond quickly to ever-changing customer demand.

The client’s existing demand forecasting and planning system could not be extended due to the tight integration of the business logic with the presentation, architecture flaws and inextensible system. In order to address these issues the client decided to automate the entire forecasting process and business planning process and implement a system that would not only facilitate the forecasting and business planning process but also promote collaboration with customers and rapid exchange of demand information with factories.

Wipro used its expertise in site design development, e-commerce, DBMS, modeling/programming, MS.NET technologies and n-tier architecture planning to design and develop a customized demand planning system. Business processes were reengineered to provide more functionality and increase efficiency and productivity.

An enterprise wide reusable object oriented framework and service oriented architecture helped develop an extensible, scalable, high performance n-tier web based solution for business planning and reporting. The system also integrates with the external systems to exchange the data between the systems. Wipro also recommended technologies and strategies for implementation and integration with existing infrastructure.

	Web enabled tracking tool for real time demand visibility
	Common UI layouts developed as presentation framework to provide increased usability, consistency and reduced development time
	Web custom control to provide Microsoft Excel functionalities and a third party Web control to display report charts
	Reusable framework which reduces development time and costs for new systems
	Integration with the external systems to exchange the data between external systems and demand planning and forecasting systems to ensure accurate data input and transfer
	Automation of data transfer process using Excel files
	Reusable, extensible components which can be used across multiple product lines. This provides a common extensible platform framework for applications to collaborate and integrate with each other