What about enriching your demand plan by customer sentiments? The value of listening, asking & understanding

Traditional demand planning is very focused on how to capitalize market opportunities given the internal forecasts of sales, demand planners and other relevant stakeholders. These forecasts are often cleansed, optimized with statistical forecast algorithms and released to supply for its propagation - nothing wrong with that and a must.

Due to the rise of the internet and social media, it's easy to share your feelings and emotions around certain products and processes, across various channels! In the past five years at SAP I've seen as well the trend of our customer's customers being open to share direct feedback in order to get a better experience, others do it over social media "indirectly". No matter which channel, it has only two outcomes: positive or negative - but is your supply chain prepared for it?

The voice of your customer in your consensus demand plan empowered by SAP IBP and Qualtrics

In my professional life I've made the experience that everything comes back to the simplest things in life: listening, asking and understanding. It's the same for your business. What's the difference to the past? We have the technology to scale and the willingness of customers to share for their own benefit. Let's get conrete - what do we need for a customer-centric demand plan? You can leverage the following sources and turn feedbacks into NPS scores:

• Social media sentiment analysis
• Surveys, market research, pricing studies etc.
• Customer feedbacks on shopping experience, delivery experience, service experience, event feedbacks,
• Customer feedbacks on products, product specifics, packaging, installation guidelines, maintenance procedures, after sales processes etc.

All these feedbacks can help you to increase your share of wallet, reduce churn, increase loyalty, reduce cost to serve, build brand awareness and improve customer acquisition. Lots of it can be handled via SAP's latest acquisition, Qualtrics.

On top considering these feedbacks help you to properly size your market opportunities, evaluate potential business risks and align your entire supply chain towards expected changes. Feedbacks can be structured and turned into relevant scores which can be consumed by supply chain planners to enrich the current inside-out driven demand plan with an outside-in view of the market.

SAP Integrated Business Planning (SAP IBP) would consume these information and help you in evaluating the feedback towards various potential scenarios (e.g. best case, worst case etc). while giving you not only the supply chain implications, but as well the financial implications of any potential decision.

Let's take a practical example:

Your sales forecast for a certain product has been based on sales forecast and the demand planners forecast, with "like-modeling" capabilities you planned the new product introduction given historical patterns of similiar products in the past. The launch has happened and through various channels customers from a certain region are posting through social media and internal surveys that the product is facing adoption issues due to its composition. In your current forecast you would still work with most probably too optimistic assumptions and ship/store the "wrong" products to the required region. By consuming the external sentiments and customer feedbacks, you could enrich your current demand plan within a new consensus demand plan to a more realistic view and trigger the required next steps (e.g. either product replacement, new allocations to markets where the same products seem to fly better due to market acceptance etc.) while quantifying the impact of your decision. Thanks to the information you can avoid overstocking on wrong products, stock-outs on the demanded products and future write-offs. At same time you avoid expensive logistics costs as you adapt your demand plan much earlier (shipments from regional DCs to local one's, inventory carrying costs etc.)

You see, there is a significant business value by feeding your supply chain planning process with customer feedbacks, sentiments and survey results. SAP IBP and Qualtrics build the perfect symphony connecting customers with your supply chain.

You are keen to learn more about some potential scenarios within your specific environment? Then contact your SAP contact person or just drop me a message!

Best wishes

Asim