In today’s fast-paced and competitive business landscape, effective demand and inventory planning can make or break a company’s success. Traditional methods, such as relying on spreadsheets, are no longer sufficient to meet the demands of modern supply chains. By embracing AI-led demand and inventory planning, businesses can unlock numerous benefits, including increased revenue, improved customer satisfaction, and enhanced operational efficiency.

Kronoscope is a cutting-edge cloud-based software, empowered by AI, that excels in demand forecasting and inventory planning. It provides comprehensive capabilities to prevent stock shortages and minimize waste, ensuring optimal stock levels at every stage of your supply chain. With this demand planning software, you can effectively manage your inventory and avoid loss of sales due to out-of-stock situations while maintaining efficient supply chain operations.

Demand Sensing

Kronoscope achieves superior demand forecasting accuracy by considering over nine influencing parameters. It develops a baseline prediction that is enhanced with factor-adjusted and similarity-adjusted predictions for more accurate results.

Baseline Demand Forecasting

Baseline predictions consider variables such as SKU, Channel, and Store levels to accurately predict demand.

Historical Trends: Using historical sales data, Kronoscope’s AI engine detects growth or decline trends in SKUs based on various attributes such as geography and time.

Seasonal Effects: Utilizing date attributes, Kronoscope’s algorithms recognize the impact of seasonality on specific SKUs. By establishing correlations between sales data and long-term seasonal influences, Kronoscope incorporates seasonality into its demand forecasting predictions, enabling accurate forecasting for the future.

Cyclicity: Similarly, Kronoscope predicts cyclicity for SKUs by considering short-term time frames effects such as the first day of the week, the last day of the month, and workdays versus weekends. The predictive engine is trained to incorporate these demand patterns into future predictions.

Outlier Corrections: To minimize prediction errors, Kronoscope detects anomalies in historical data.

Pricing and Promotions Planning

Marketers strive for higher sales using pricing and promotions. However, demand planners face challenges in predicting the impact. Discover how Kronoscope simplifies demand forecasting for better accuracy and competitive advantage.

Price Sensitivity

Kronoscope calculates price sensitivity at granular levels and demand forecasting is done based on these changes. SKU and geography combinations establish price sensitivity curves to determine the impact of price changes.

Price Optimization

Demand planning software calculates and recommends price points to maximize revenue and meet targets, considering wallet share, margin constraints, and company objectives. Demand planners can integrate the updated demand numbers into purchase and replenishment planning modules for streamlined decision-making.

Capturing Promotions Data & Understanding Its Impact

Kronoscope simplifies event planning by allowing individual or bulk additions of event plans, capturing data on SKU segments, event types, treatment, and date range. Its AI engine utilizes advanced algorithms, considering historical and future events, to predict demand uplift during event periods. Real-time calculations provide demand pattern suggestions, while planners can edit and refine plans and generate inventory plans once finalized.

Visual Correlation Between The Impact Of Promotions And Demand

Kronoscope’s bottoms-up demand sensing quickly adapts to demand changes. It offers granular insights and generates a promotional uplift chart, displaying baseline demand forecasting for upcoming events. Planners can refine the system’s recommendations using their expertise.

Purchase & Replenishment Planning

Kronoscope’s AI engine automates purchase planning for demand planners. It considers lead times, fill rates, shelf life, inventory levels, open orders, and dynamic safety stock levels. Dynamic safety levels are assigned based on demand variability, service levels, coverage days, and supplier fill rates.

In Kronoscope, demand planners have three replenishment planning modes available to them.

Fixed Duration Replenishment Plan:

The fixed duration replenishment plan in Kronoscope allows users to define the replenishment period and offset for order recommendations. However, users must review and create transfer recommendations for the next cycle before the current plan period ends.

Fixed Schedule Replenishment Plan:

In a fixed schedule replenishment plan, Kronoscope generates transfer recommendations for SKU-branch combinations on specific dates. The replenishment schedule, defined at the SKU/location/Category level, is fed into the demand planning software on the backend.

Dynamic Replenishment Plan

In a dynamic replenishment plan, Kronoscope’s AI engine suggests replenishment norms based on factors like SKU shelf life, current inventory, and safety stock. It recommends how stock should move between nodes in the network to minimize sales loss and overstocking. Kronoscope simplifies purchase planning, automating operations with a few clicks for faster procurements. The supplier scoring mechanism helps teams choose the best vendor based on the lead time, fill rate, and prices, providing valuable insights for vendor negotiations.

‍Fixed Duration Purchase Plan

In this mode, demand planners manually define the inventory coverage period, and SKU order recommendations are generated accordingly. Planners select the start and end dates to generate order recommendations, without a fixed schedule or review calendar. Supplier lead time should be considered in this process.

Fixed Schedule Purchase Plan

The ordering schedule, defined at SKU/location/Category/Supplier level, is fed into Kronoscope’s backend. It specifies the recommended purchase days for specific SKUs from designated suppliers at specific locations. Demand planners can access the UI daily to generate plans for selected vendors/SKUs. Kronoscope handles other constraints automatically or through predefined system settings.

Dynamic Purchase Plan

Kronoscope automatically suggests and optimizes location-SKU level norms (DOH and schedule) when demand planners rely on the system without ordering constraints. Planners can generate a dynamic purchase plan for SKUs approaching the lower inventory limit or anticipating increased demand.

‍Sales & Operations Planning

Kronoscope combines intuition and automation for seamless business operations. With Kronoscope’s power, your expertise is enhanced, enabling fast and precise demand and inventory plans. It promotes seamless collaboration among teams that traditionally work in silos, ensuring perfect synchrony across sales, marketing, and operations.

Optimizing Service Levels

Kronoscope classifies SKUs into ABC categories to maintain service levels. Class A achieves a 95% service level, Class B ranges from 80% to 90%, and Class C ranges from 75% to 80%.

Dynamic Safety Levels

Kronoscope’s dynamic demand forecasting and inventory planning enable flexible safety levels to manage cash flows and working capital. High-demand, high-variability products are assigned higher dynamic safety levels.

Accurate Inventory Pile-Up Prediction

Demand planning software optimizes working capital and simplifies inventory management. It proactively identifies overstocked SKUs at any supply chain level, preventing wasted time, expenses, and missed opportunities.

Accurate Stock-out Prediction

Kronoscope optimizes working capital by predicting stock-outs and suggesting safety threshold levels. It proactively identifies at-risk SKUs in the supply chain to prevent out-of-stock losses.

About the Company

Kronoscope, developed by Fountain9, is an AI-based demand planning software that enables accurate demand prediction for businesses. It considers various criteria to anticipate demand, allowing businesses to maintain optimal stock levels and plan their inventory effectively. With precise forecast results, replenishment orders can be placed at the right moment once the reorder point is reached.