BluePlanner is used to create a bottom-up forecast of sales with detail at the lowest level of the customer, product, and time hierarchies you use. This creates structured, detailed, reliable source of the sales team’s forecast…and your demand forecast can be imported into BluePlanner for direct comparison. Demand Planning can either access this directly in BluePlanner or an extract can be created to send the data to your Supply Chain software.
In preparation for the creation of a consensus forecast, the headquarter sales team usually needs to capture adjustments for dynamics that are not represented in the bottom-up forecast (e.g. future price changes that will affect volume, risks & opportunities, allocations, etc). BluePlanner IBP is then used to create an independent forecast that incorporates these adjustments. The end result is the sale team’s input to the consensus forecast.
