Forcasting Flexibility

Venus allows you to work on your product portfolio at the supplier, brand, location, size, or item level. View individual items or rollups at any level. Organize and view your portfolio in the way that makes most sense to you.

In-depth Information

Venus allows access to the same information used by the purchasing team. This ability to get in-depth information on any given product enables users to leverage all available information when updating sales expectations.

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What can Venus do for you?

The NBDS Mars Inventory Planning solution calculates forecasted demand for each of your SKUs based on the patterns established iwth their sales history. But sales do not always follow historical patterns. What happens when a customer let's you know they are planning a large one time buy? Automatic forecasting solutions can't foresee radical changes in the sales pattern. Venus is used by your sales and marketing teams to forecast unusual depletion expectations for all regularly stocked products due to changed demands, sales programs, discount programs, or supplier incentives.

The sales and marketing teams don't need to make purchasing decisions or recommend purchase quantities. By forecasting expected changes in the depletion pattern, the system will automatically recomment the correct purchase orders for the purchasing team.

Each Venus user has a personal Attention Queue to help automatically focus on the areas where there is the most need for planning and review. Clicking on an item in the queue immediately brings the item(s) into focus on the main forrecasting screen. The Attention Queue is both extremely flexible and configurable. Only the factors important to your business decide what gets focus.

Venus Features

  • Smooth forecasting to mitigate one-time buy incidents
  • Seasonality - Insertion of a previously established pattern, or create a new pattern
  • Review Mars generated system forecasts, whether standard or trended to determine if they fit expected depletions
  • Overrides created in Venus supersede both standard and trended forecasts used by purchasing team in determining product need
  • All forecast overrides are archived once the month is complete
  • Override history is visible for sixteen months (beginning the month after the override is over)
  • Reports: Forecast performance, Busted forecasts, Product Sales Trends, plus many more

Complete Integration with Purchasing

As forecasts are updated in Venus, the system rebuilds an optimum purchase order in Mars taking into account the new market information. Your business intelligence is integrated into the informed purchasing recommendations in Mars. There's no need to send emails or call to inform purchasing of the changing market conditions.

If a Mars buyer needs feedback from sales or marketing, they can send a request for review right from their buying screen. The request is instantly available in Venus. The system even automatically brings the exact item or group of items up in the main forecasting screen for review. After review, Mars then merges the buyer is immediately informed and updated so purchasing can proceed with the latest market informatoin.

Venus users also have complete access to the buyers schedules so they can easily coordinate forecasting updates to coincide with purchasing activity.

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What can Venus do for my business?

The bottom line results can be striking! Better integration of business market intelligence into the forecasting process leads to better buying decisions. Inventory shrinks as you move out slow stock and tailor future purchases to expected needs. Fill rates go up as the system identifies products to order in more heavily. And you spend far less time determining what to order, since most of the detailed work is automated.