Fast-growing pharma company transforms forecasting with a comprehensive demand plan

As growing manufacturing companies expand their product portfolios and market reach, they often run headlong into the limitations of their technology solutions. One global pharmaceutical company that develops novel medicines experienced those growing pains with its forecasting and demand planning systems.

 “Our business focuses on launching new products, and our forecasting process relies on data from multiple stakeholders in finance, marketing and supply planning,” says the company’s Senior Manager of Demand Planning. “For every product we make, we receive information from different countries in different formats, which makes it difficult to build a consistent global forecast. We needed a central place to record all of this information in order to plan more effectively.”

Deploying a pre-configured demand planning application

Seeing an opportunity to transform demand planning from a manual chore into a strategic decision-making process, the demand planning team selected Anaplan’s preconfigured Demand Planning application. The application brings together product and customer lifecycle management, demand simulation, and statistical analysis to improve forecast and demand planning accuracy. The result is an end-to-end demand planning solution.

“We used many of the pre-built features as they were,” the Senior Manager recalls. “Any tweaks we requested were made quickly and easily by our implementation partner. As a result, we have a demand planning solution that is configured entirely to meet our needs.”

Comprehensive demand forecasting for all countries

The Consensus Planning feature in the app makes it easy to share information in real time across teams. “We see all the information on a single screen, and updates show up in the forecast immediately,” says the Senior Manager. “Having the right data in one place brings professionalism to the demand planning function and ensures that our insights feed into the company’s strategic decisions. It’s been easier to get buy-in from senior management with a proper system backing up our work.”

Two app features — Temporary Product and Customer and Product and Customer Chaining — enable demand planners to combine products to get a full view of demand. “We often run an early access program for our drugs, in which we supply the product to patients on a trial basis before we commercialize the product,” the Senior Manager explains. “The early access and commercial products must be tracked separately, but the app enables us to bring the data from both together to forecast the full demand in all countries.”

The time the pharmaceutical manufacturer previously spent consolidating data from multiple sources and building new forecasting models is now available for complex, strategic tasks. “For example, we can now create forecasts for countries where our products have not yet launched. This gives us a clear view of what demand will be in five to 10 years’ time,” the Senior Manager notes. “That insight feeds directly into our manufacturing facility to inform production decisions, and senior management uses it for additional planning. So the Anaplan demand planning app enables us to accurately forecast demand as we grow and move into new markets.”