Consumer products manufacturers are serving more markets globally with more products than ever before, while sourcing from a complex global supply network. At the same time, consumer demand is becoming even more dynamic and volatile.

You need to respond faster and smarter to changes in demand and supply to exceed your customer service targets, while reducing inventories and total supply chain costs. According to AMR Research, the most advanced demand-sensing companies have 15% less inventory, a 17% better perfect order performance, and a 35% shorter cash-to-cash cycle time. As a result, they have 10% higher revenue and 5-7% better profit margins than their competitors.*

SAP helps consumer products manufacturers successfully overcome these challenges by enabling a collaborative demand and supply planning process.

Solutions for Collaborative Demand and Supply Planning

With its integrated coverage of business processes, SAP helps companies continuously sense and respond to customer demand fluctuations, supplier delivery volatility, and operational disruptions across the entire network.

This is accomplished by covering these three core areas:

• Sales and operations planning – Balance total demand and supply globally across the network to be enabled to maximize your operating margin, improve control of escalating costs, and make operations more efficient.
• Collaborative demand management – Improve demand accuracy and response to real demand, while being able to reduce the reliance on forecasts that can never be right.
• Supply planning – Drive instant synchronization of the supply network across distribution, manufacturing, and suppliers to make fast and profitable response to market dynamics possible.

Powered by applications such as SAP ERP , SAP Supply Chain Management , SAP Customer Relationship Management , and Duet for demand planning , you can:

• Consistently achieve and exceed customer service-level targets
• Reduce cycle times
• Reduce inventory and distribution costs
• Reduce supply chain costs

With the SAP NetWeaver platform , you can integrate internal and external data sources and partner applications into one business process so they can integrate internal and external demand signals and provide visibility into inventory and production across the network.

SAP Services provides offerings that support the creation of a strategic plan, development of a road map, and execution of a value assessment to help drive your supply network process improvements. In addition, partner consulting services provide a broad range of services that can help you optimize your collaborative demand and supply planning initiatives.

* Cecere, Lora, et al., The Handbook for Becoming Demand Driven, AMR Research, July 2005.

Learn More

• Find out more about SAP partner solutions and services.