Testimonials
"Through its mature processes and metrics driven approach, Wipro has optimised our supply chain enabling us to provide superior service to our customers. This has led to returns in terms of retention of existing customers and attracting new ones."
Phil Stubbington
Service Delivery Head - Global Freight Management
Exel
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Home  Wholesale Distribution Demand Planning
Demand Planning
Wholesale distributors have realized that accurate demand forecasting can be a significant source of competitive advantage in an era of shorter product life cycles, increasing SKU count and inventory obsolescence. Improved forecasting accuracy can progressively lead to better inventory management, better customer service and improved fill rates.
The changing role of the distributor from a pick, pack and load operator to an integrated supply chain specialist has made demand planning a more complex task. Distributors need to predict not just the demand for their company owned inventory but should collaborate at different levels to manage activities like order fulfillment and promotion management for their customers. Since distributors are primarily responsible for order fulfillment they can’t rely on forecasting models where the level of aggregation is at the product family level. The imperative is to arrive at a robust model that helps distributors to forecast at the SKU (Ship to / sold to customer) level. In addition to this the ever increasing line card of the distributor should also be ably supported by a well defined new product forecasting system.
Wipro’s demand planning expertise coupled with a strong focus on distribution domain can help distributors to improve customer facing metrics like:
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On time Delivery performance |
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Order fill rate |
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Inventory turns |
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Order lead time |
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Reduced out of stock scenarios |
Technology can play a key role in helping distributors to offer several other value added services or scale up these services with greater confidence. Sometimes a distributor's IT investment for internal process efficiency/ data accuracy can also enable him to offer a value added service. For example an electronic component distributor’s Product Information management investments also empowers the company to offer component information service as a fee based service to OEMs, contract manufacturers or Electronic Manufacturing Service (EMS) providers. Technology investments can also empower a distribution company to accomplish the following:
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Provide Global Data Synchronization ( GDS ) as a value added service to customers |
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Support VMI schemes serving as the single point of contact and contract compliance for big suppliers |
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Compete with 3 PL players to provide order fulfillment and in bound logistics services |
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