Innovation Planning — A Critical Component of a CPG Growth Strategy
The CPG Volume and Innovation Planning solution allows all stakeholders (corporate planning, demand planning, marketing, account teams, and distributors) access to real-time information to ensure that the Financial and Sales Volume plans associated with new item launches are accurate and timely.
The solution allows these stakeholders to operate with velocity and a level of granularity that would be impossible using traditional planning software or spreadsheets and positions CPGs for success despite the volatility of marketplace dynamics.
Solution Benefits
Ability to create a new item as a starting point prior to being in the ERP product master
Plan at aggregate levels while making granular adjustments to market or customer plans that are based localized market dynamics
Ability to forecast sales, profit, and margin
Benchmark new item forecast based on historical data of one or more existing SKUs
Complete flexibility to make adjustments to volume assumptions at all levels
Direct linkage to demand plans that ensure adequate supply for meeting new item launch promotions and demand generation activities
CPG Volume & Innovation Planning
Anaplan provides a comprehensive solution for CPG volume and NPI planning by integrating demand forecasting, supply chain planning, scenario modeling, collaboration, analytics, and scalability.
It enables you to create robust plans, optimize your operations, and make data-driven decisions to achieve your volume and NPI objectives in the dynamic CPG industry.
Volume Innovation Value Stream
Volume planning for CPG companies is challenging and even more so when new items are involved. Multiple stakeholders with siloed communication and processes, lack of historical data, and the uncertainty of consumer reactions all conspire to make planning an extremely difficult process.
With less than 3% of new items succeeding in the marketplace, the stakes are high to get innovative plans as accurate as possible to ensure alignment of marketing activities, adequate product supply, and excellent retail execution. By providing a connected volume and innovation planning solution, CPGs can ensure that planners can create the optimal plan to increase new item launch success rates.
CPG Case Study
10bn Leading Wine Company in the U.S. Wine Industry and select markets around the world
Challenge
Extremely manual, Excel-based process prone to errors and lacked scalability
Siloed business functional planning
Lack of version control, auditability, and input level flexibility
Challenge
Disconnected innovation planning across core business functions
Inaccurate projections with inconsistent variance drivers across teams
Disconnected and misaligned messaging for innovation effectiveness
Solution
Solution
Outcome/Benefit
Allowed sales team to input precent changes relative to prior year volume at multiple levels of the hierarchies—enhanced visibility into impact at a summarized level
Improved collaboration across Sales, Distributors, and Finance teams for increased confidence in decision
Over 75% reduction in time spent building the annual Distributor Plan
Outcome/Benefit
Collaborative tool & standardized process enabled key process visibility and alignment between Demand Planning, Sales, Finance, Customer Development, and Brand teams
Increased new item planning efficiency and consistency through benchmark setting, assumption builds and cascading functionality
Increased planning accuracy by incorporating customer development team input for innovation products at retail level
Enhance granularity in planning inputs for customer and geo allowed more effective and success new item launches
