What is NetSuite Demand Planning?

NetSuite Demand Planning helps businesses predict future inventory needs based on historical demand, seasonality, open opportunities, sales forecasts and other metrics. By pinpointing when to reorder items, and in what quantities, you optimize stock levels and enhance supply chain planning. NetSuite Demand Planning delivers improved forecast accuracy, ensuring you have the right items on hand to fill orders without having overstock sitting idle on warehouse shelves, raising carrying costs.

What is NetSuite Demand Planning? (Video)

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Optimize inventory and improve forecast accuracy

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Efficiently Manage Cash Flow

With visibility into what is needed, and when, planners can avoid preordering or bringing in excess materials. This minimizes carrying costs and the amount of cash tied up in inventory.

Demand planning is a big aspect of what we do. It really comes from looking at historical data. NetSuite allows us to understand the historical velocity of any one product.

Tomei Thomas
CEO, Beekman 1802

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NetSuite Demand Planning Benefits


  • Increase Inventory Turns. Efficiently stock and replenish products based on sales.
  • Optimize Inventory Levels. Order inventory as needed, decreasing overhead and carrying costs and eliminating excess stock.
  • Drive Profitability and ROI. Ensure you have adequate stock to fill customer orders — without excess that will go unsold or need to be discounted.

NetSuite Demand Planning Features

Have the right materials available — at the right time, in the right place — to deliver increased revenues, higher profits and maximum ROI.

Forecasting

With NetSuite Demand Planning, companies can evaluate expected orders and present that information in a variety of ways. The menu structure shows the process to calculate demand, review demand plans and revise where required; generate supply plans, review and edit plans; and finally generate purchase, transfer and work orders. Companies can generate actual transactions and skip planned orders if desired.

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Multi-Location Inventory

Easily define multiple inventory locations with real-time visibility. Locations can be organized hierarchically, and global businesses can define relevant countries. During the planning process, the system can be set up to automatically create transfer orders between locations as necessary.

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Item Setup

Easily define the parameters that affect each item. Options include defining an item as being available to demand planning, establishing an alternate source for a new item with no sales history and establishing which distribution network and category an item might belong to if using NetSuite's DRP (distribution resource planning) functionality so you can transfer inventory between locations. Companies may also set additional planning parameters that affect either how demand is evaluated or how planned orders are generated.

multi-order picking dashboard

Allocation Exceptions Management

Planners can review all sources of supply and manage allocations to ensure that high-priority orders ship complete and on time. The system provides intelligent supply reallocation recommendations designed to redirect resources from multiple unallocated orders and fulfill priority orders first while minimizing effects on other customers. NetSuite Demand Planning also works to reduce the time required to plan, review and execute reallocations. After you accept a recommendation, the system automatically realigns supplies with affected orders.

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Challenges NetSuite Demand Planning Solves


  • Obsolete Inventory. Accurate forecasts, based on historical sales and seasonality, minimize excess stock that goes unsold.
  • Lost Sales. Ensure product availability and maximize sales by accurately planning for future demand.
  • High Overhead Costs. Eliminate excess overhead associated with storing unsold inventory.
  • Production Delays. Ensure materials are available when needed so that production is not halted waiting for goods to arrive.

SuiteSuccess – Your proven path to success


Leveraging more than 25 years of experience working with tens of thousands of organizations, across all industries and business sizes, our SuiteSuccess customer lifecycle methodology helps customers transform their business. It starts by building an AI-powered, integrated business suite with industry-specific solutions. Then we engage with your business to ensure that we’re addressing your specific needs and guiding you along the way on how to best consume and optimize NetSuite to solve challenges of today and the future. This approach helps ensure customers experience faster time-to-value, better ROI, and greater employee adoption.

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How Much Does NetSuite Demand Planning Cost?


Companies of every size, from pre-revenue startups to fast-growing businesses, have made the move to NetSuite. Looking for a better way to run your business but wondering about the cost?

Users subscribe to NetSuite for an annual license fee. Your license is made up of three main components: core platform, optional modules and the number of users. There is also a one-time implementation fee for initial setup. As your business grows, you can easily activate new modules and add users – that’s the beauty of cloud software.

NetSuite Demand Planning is available as an add-on module.

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