4 Ways to Create Intelligent Capacity Plans with Real-Time Demand Sensing

Today’s multidimensional supply chains have a string of overlapping stages with interconnected complexities.

Capacity planning is one such essential aspect which often involves managing several complex orders to balance resource utilization, inventory and stock levels, demand and supply synchronization, all of this to finally align the overall operating capacity and maintain optimal throughput.

Capacity planning ensures  the organization is effectively able to identify bottlenecks, streamline supply chain operations, and reduce the risk of a possibility of not being able to meet supply chain demand.

Capacity planning is also essential for organizations that are planning to scale up services, therefore providing the right information is needed to plan various necessary resources.

To ensure accurate planning and smooth movement of goods and services, and arrive at the right product-mix it is critical to optimize your capacity plan so that you are able to respond to rapid changes with speed and agility. With an intelligent capacity plan in place, supply chain managers can use a single source of truth that can help balance production capacity and workforce needs to make sure the supply value chain is equipped to meet possible demand. It also helps businesses create a detailed roadmap to scale, identify and eliminate bottlenecks, work out a good design capacity, and mitigate risk, within a planned period of time.

Real-Time Demand Sensing Fuels Intelligent Capacity Plans

Demand predictions drive almost every key decision in the supply chain matrix and getting predictions right, in real-time can result in huge competitive advantage.

When capacity plans are based on accurate demand insights it helps boost sales margins through better customer service, reduced capital locked up in inventory, enhanced productivity and better coordination of movement of goods and services. 

Demand Sensing, helps pick up short-term trends quickly to help predict customer demand better, smarter and faster.

Using Demand Sensing tools, planners can create near-term forecasts that accurately show current market trends and apply those to plan capacity using real-time insights, automation techniques and machine learning algorithms.

Here can Real-time Demand Sensing help Supply Chain Planners with Accurate Capacity Planning:

Better Forecast Accuracy

An AI-enabled demand sensing software can improve your capacity planning efforts with higher forecast accuracy from the traditional 60% to more than 80%.

It can enhance demand forecasting in the supply chain and boost capacity planning turnaround by leveraging multiple real-time signals to sense demand shifts and respond swiftly to varying market conditions.

Optimized Inventory Planning

With the right demand sensing solutions,  supply chain planners and managers can dynamically optimize inventory and balance the entire network by considering not only available inventory in regional warehouses, but also factor in expected customer demand.

This acts as a great input for accurate capacity plans as inventory is optimized based on real-time demand sensing and this reduces the overall margin for errors.

Accurate Response to Demand Patterns

When organizations leverage AI-powered demand sensing, capacity plans are better equipped to respond to evolving demand patterns and market fluctuations.

This happens by continuously using algorithms that leverage deep learning to suggest improvements through cross-learning, using internal and external data inputs to detect patterns. 

Better Production Visibility and ROI

Using the right demand sensing techniques, they are better aligned to the expected demand, given an organization’s throughput.  This helps drive a better level of end-to-end visibility across all touch points in the supply chain.

Also, with the right AI-powered demand sensing solution, supply planners can easily create a balance between production capabilities and demand trends, to stitch the demand and supply dynamics seamlessly.

Make Accurate Capacity Plans with ThroughPut’s  Demand Sensing Module:

ThroughPut’s Demand Sensing Solution is your data-driven go-to capacity planning and forecasting tool to accurately analyze and correlate demand insights and respond to fluctuating margins and inventory needs. 

ThroughPut gives the right insights across your capacity planning needs to help you easily predict future demand patterns and streamline the flow of materials, processes, output and free cash flow, across your integrated supply chain.

Take a quick demo of the demand sensing software here and experience seamless capacity planning yourself.