SOLUTIONS
Demand Forecasting Control Tower
Optimize Inventory ROI with AI Powered Precision
PartnerLinQ’s Demand Forecasting Control Tower transforms demand planning from a reactive, spreadsheet-driven process into an AI-powered, real-time intelligence function.
PartnerLinQ provides complete ecosystem through four core capability pillars:
End-to-End
Connectivity
Seamlessly integrate high-velocity demand data with planning and execution systems (ERP, POS, WMS).
Unified Data Model
Operational data, planning outputs, and external market signals reside on a single platform, eliminating data silos.
AI-Driven Intelligence
Leverage ML for predictive analytics, automated color/size splitting, and abnorm scenario display to transform raw data into actionable insights.
Composability & Flexibility
The modular architecture allows the solution to be easily configured to define different models on different hierarchies and incorporate unique retail/wholesale valorization logic.
Features & Capabilities
PartnerLinQ’s Demand Forecasting Control Tower offers a robust set of features designed to manage complex forecasting variables, model product lifecycles, and simplify collaborative planning across all hierarchies.
Automated & Modeled Suggestions: Creates automated forecast suggestions in value or volume and uses sophisticated models to project demand taking into account baseline, periodical promotion, and enlargement distribution.
Lifecycle and OOS Management: Supports forecast adjustment to EOL model and respects OOS situations for forecast suggestions, including calculating refill quantities once SKU is available again.
Hierarchical Splitting and Linking: Enables automated Color / Size splitting and supports aggregated planning on any hierarchy. Allows users to link items (e.g., style to another style, a customer to another customer) for comparison.
Fixed Quantity Control: Supports forecast quantities that are fixed and will not be adjusted during topdown/bottom-up/middle-out adjustment, maintaining plan integrity.
S&OP and S&OE Support: Our platform orchestrates end-to-end processes and approvals with configurable process queues and pre- built templates, ensuring alignment across your organization.
Return and Order Adjustments: Allows planning returns by % or absolute on any hierarchy and provides the ability to adjust forecast to order + X % for a certain time frame.
Data Cleansing and Versioning: "Clean" historical data from peaks (e.g., promotions, big orders) and offers the capability to recreate an old version of the forecast.
Abnorm Scenario Display: Display abnorm scenarios (e.g., Order income > Fcst, Item forecast not reaching MOQ, Forecast earlier than leadtime) with the possibility to directly dive into the details.
Time-Series Variance Visualization: Provides visualization of differences between the versions (Sensed vs. Consensus Forecast) to understand the magnitude of the short-term correction aligned with your industry and organizational calendars.
Valorization and Evaluation: Supports forecast valorization considering the different model of point of sales (Owned, Affiliated, Franchisee) and the evaluation of planned quantities in ERP (Budget & LE).
Technology
A solution's technology vision must align with your organization’s future aspirations. PartnerLinQ’s modern, composable architecture ensures a Control Tower solution that is not only powerful today but will scale to meet your evolving needs.
- Cloud-Native & Multi-Cloud Architecture: Our scalable, cloud-native architecture is built for demanding planning cycles, ensuring fast processing and seamless performance. We support multi-cloud environments, providing the flexibility to align with your organization’s cloud strategy.
- Composability: Built on an API-first and microservices architecture, our platform provides the extensibility and flexibility to adapt to your unique needs, helping you achieve a truly composable enterprise.
Intelligent Data Applications Framework: Our framework allows you to easily onboard and enrich external data sets and factors with AI-based predictions, creating a richer input signal for your control tower and accelerating the evolution of your digital intelligence with ease.
Extensive Prebuilt Adapters: We offer prebuilt, composable integration adapters for over 80 enterprise application platforms, including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Dynamics Business Central, Manhattan Active Omni and Salesforce.
Seamless Data Flow: Our bi-directional integration capabilities with ERP, TMS, WMS, MES, IoT, and external data sources ensure a continuous flow of real-time operational data for a single source of truth.
Trading Partner Network: Our native integration with your trading partner network allows for real-time data capture (e.g., POS data, order status), ensuring your control tower is always informed by the most current operational signals.
Custom Algorithm & Model Development: The platform provides a unified environment for in-house development of custom algorithms and models, giving your teams the tools to continuously evolve the solution (e.g., custom optimization logic).
Third-Party Analytic Integration: Easily integrate third-party analytics and leverage public APIs to expand the control tower models and connect with external data sources (e.g., weather data, traffic feeds).
Industry Knowledge Graph and Data Models: PartnerLinQ’s industry data models and supply chain knowledge graph instantly enable out-of-the-box reporting, search, and proactive alerting capabilities to a whole new level of sophistication and extensibility.
User Experience
The user experience for Demand Forecasting is designed to provide intuitive visualization, actionable insights, and exception-based management, empowering users to make rapid, informed decisions.
Customized Performance Dashboards: Customized dashboards showing most relevant informations, e.g. Top X Over-/Underperforming items/customers/etc with the possibility to deep dive down to lowest hierarchy level for a selectable timeframe.
On-the-Fly UI Customization: Advanced UI features include the ability to create UI on the fly, share, add/remove fields as per need.
Flexible Data Handling: Users can easily upload quantities from another file (e.g. Excel) and utilize flexible data import and export in various formats (like Excel, Powerpoint, PowerBI, PDF).
Abnorm Scenario Diving: The system will display abnorm scenarios (e.g., Order income > Fcst, Color/Size grid not consistent) with the possibility to directly dive into the details.
Prescriptive Recommendations: Provides system calculated suggestions (on daily, weekly, monthly bases) based on historical data + Sales input.
Collaborative Context: Enables users to add comments as back up information on any hierarchy level and export comments to any format.
Implementation Advantage
Our agile implementation approach for Demand Forecasting focuses on rapidly integrating your critical demand data and configuring specialized forecasting models to deliver immediate value.
Rapid Data Source Integration: Expedited connection and ingestion of data from ERP, POS, and external market signals to enable real-time data ingestion.
Configurable Modeling & Hierarchy: Quick setup and customization of different models on different hierarchies and the definition of all planning hierarchies (Legal entity, COT, Brand, etc.).
Data Cleansing Rules Setup: Implementation includes setting up rules to automatically "clean" historical data from peaks (e.g., promotions) for accurate baseline calculation.
Core KPI & Metric Setup: Fast configuration of relevant financial and planning KPIs, including Net Sales and Gross Profit at the required planning levels.
End Result & Business Benefit
PartnerLinQ’s Demand Forecasting Control Tower delivers tangible improvements in planning accuracy, inventory investment, and financial compliance, transforming your operations into a competitive advantage.
Maximized Accuracy: Achieve a significant improvement in overall Forecast Accuracy % by leveraging AI and advanced modeling techniques for both core and new items.
Optimized Inventory: Reduces risk and cost by enabling accurate purchasing, minimizing the need for costly markdowns and liquidations, and ensuring forecast adjustment to EOL model is executed effectively.
Financial Alignment: Provides reliable forecast valorization and evaluation of planned quantities in ERP against versions (Budget & LE), ensuring financial plans are grounded in realistic demand.
Operational Agility: Enables planners to quickly display abnorm scenarios and take immediate action, improving the quality of the forecast being shared with downstream fulfillment processes.
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