Connected Planning for the Bottling Industry
By: Russel Gummelt, Travis O’brien and Jay Lee
The bottling industry has endured a series of significant changes over the past few years, due to supply chain disruptions, stringent regulations and the changing behaviors of customers. Combined with ramifications felt during the COVID-19 pandemic, many leaders are seeking new tactics to improve the functionality of their operational processes.
Allitix and Anaplan offer a customizable business platform destined to provide partners in the bottling industry flexible, scalable and collaborative solutions that offer insight into their business from edge to edge.
Top-Down, Bottom-Up Solutions
The goal of demand planning is to forecast the market size your goods or services will occupy. Accurate demand planning strategically assesses your revenue and determines the investment needed in the products that will resonate with your target market.
A top-down approach to forecasting estimates demand at an aggregate level – a product group, for example – and then allocates a portion of the forecast to lower levels like brand and customer segment.
To effectively create a top-down forecast, you need to account for variables, such as sales volume for a particular region, at the highest level of the forecasting hierarchy. Disaggregating this forecast by geographical area will allow your business to create a demand strategy based on the forecasted needs of the now-smaller markets within your region. The need to examine the individual cities – and stores within them – of the regions that compromise your market ensures
A bottom-up approach to forecasting accounts for the projection of micro-level inputs to reach revenue and income targets. The estimation of these micro-factors can be difficult for your business to ascertain, due to the various factors that can influence the supply chain. Bottom-up forecasting predicts actual sales units by observing product demand in the market, comparing demand from previous years. This approach to demand planning is often considered to provide realistic insight into the projection forecast planning strategy by dealing with fundamental data.
Allitix offers connected demand forecast & accuracy software that allows our partners in the bottling industry fast and comprehensive insight into their organization. Here’s how integrating this scalable, customized platform can enhance your operational efficiency and offer valuable insights into both top-down and bottom-up demand forecasting:
Compare multiple demand planning models. Combine statistical forecasting, historical drivers and top-down assumptions to provide your business with multiple forecast iterations.
Contrast variances between your historical forecasts and how accurate they are when measured against actual demand.
Enjoy granular, scalable insight into relevant data in the bottling industry like sales and demand plans by retailer, package and division. Analyze everything from the performance of flavors and SKUs to the promotions that influence consumer purchasing habits.
Anaplan’s stat forecasting tool integrates seamlessly with the revenue growth management (RGM) budgeting app and demand forecasting tool to make fluid, live transfer of predicted volume possible. This integration will allow your business to achieve the true end-to-end functionality essential to enhance the efficiency of demand forecasting, saving your workforce valuable time once spent coalescing data from multiple sources.
With Anaplan’s hyperscale computing capabilities, the data is collected for you and presented via a single source of truth, offering near-real-time insight into the metrics essential to your business.
The Budget is Always Supposed to be Wrong
This statement has perhaps never been more applicable than it is right now given the market upheaval of the past few years.
The global COVID-19 pandemic showcased instability across all industries, which has led to new forecasting methodologies, with the old models no longer relevant in many cases. Find the right marketing equilibrium moving forward with Anaplan sales forecasting.
By integrating our customizable software into your business projections, Anaplan will help you find the balance between supply and demand, combining your relevant historical data with new KPIs and metrics.
This predictive analysis will enable you to chart the “new normal” by extrapolating new formulas from old data. For example, 2019 and 2021 history can stitch together a composite of what 2020 could have looked like, if not for the unprecedented disruption of the global pandemic.
Throw out Your Spreadsheets
Free your planners! By partnering with Allitix and Anaplan, your accountants and planners will no longer spend time looking through data sets from specific retailers in order to attempt to piece together a forecast model.
Anaplan performs the heavy lifting for them, aggregating data sets automatically and enabling your workforce to focus on predictive models, rather than the wasted time spent chasing data.
Thanks to Allitix, your workforce can focus on the results that matter. We’ll gather all of your various departments, consolidate their workflow and focus on the real-time delivery of data that they’ll then analyze to improve the efficiency of your demand forecasting.
One of our bottling partners, Swire Coca-Cola USA, shaved their new budget process from a month-and-a-half to two weeks!
The Anaplan allocation engine provides robust functionality and two-fold granularity planning. Your forecasting team can take advantage of insights aimed at the retailer-package-division level, while your FP&A experts zero in on material-profit center insights to drive calculations using volume as a predictor.
While you’re at it, why not track the per-package performance of your products to highlight which SKUs are popular, and which are not? Anaplan allows oversight scalability down to a case-by-case basis and can help you compare the data against different profit centers.
By combining the valuable sightlines of both top-down and bottom-up forecasting, your business will be armed with the predictive knowledge necessary to steer operations effectively in the ‘new normal.’
Demand Planning that Speaks Your Language
Allitix and Anaplan will integrate seamlessly into your operational infrastructure, and work alongside your IT and FP&A departments to ensure cross-departmental efficiency. No matter the strategy you employ, we’re there with you, providing valuable insight and data extrapolation in order to enhance your demand planning efforts.
As we’ve learned over the years of working with leaders in the bottling industry, when it comes to effectively forecasting the needs of your customers, there’s really no “one right way” to do it.
Some bottlers accept what their sales forecast tells them. If this is the case with your business, we’ll make determinations based on the validity of your incoming data. Others prefer to let the data flow in and accept it as a suggestion or guideline, granting their team the latitude to override the information as they see fit. Whatever your preferred method of demand forecasting, Anaplan’s case fill allocation metric will allow your team to see precisely what is being delivered versus what is being sold.
Our work with bottling partners has provided us insight that might help your business – chances are, you’re not the only company to face a particular challenge, and our insights can often provide assistance!
In some cases, Anaplan integration has even led to innovation, with some of our bottling partners learning new and more efficient ways to view their data.
Anaplan allows the accurate creation of long-range and near-term forecasts that feed demand and budgeting functions.
Allitix is the consulting firm to partner with when it comes to bottling and more.
When integrated into your FP&A and IT departments, our insight into the demand drivers of the industry – combined with the adaptability of a customized Anaplan solution – makes for an ideal, results-driven team.
To learn more about how Allitix offers flexible, scalable strategies for your demand forecasting needs, contact us today.