Mariah Carey loves to sing,  “All I Want for Christmas Is You”. But a manufacturing firm would be like, Nah, rather know what’s the market demand gonna be. 😋

Why? For better inventory management, resource allocation, financial planning, and loss aversion. 

How? With RevOps.

What is manufacturing demand forecasting? 

It’s all about predicting the upcoming market demand for improved production planning, supply chain coordination, and resource allocation. 

For this, you leverage historical data and market trends to predict future outcomes.

How manufacturing demand forecasting gives you a competitive advantage

It gives an edge over your competitors with enhanced operational efficiency, dynamic forecasting, better product lifecycle management, and revamped inventory management.

As a result, your cost efficiency gets enhanced through demand forecasting in the manufacturing sector. 

Talking of cost efficiency, Toyota reduced inventory costs significantly with the Just-in-Time (JIT) Manufacturing approach. In this, method, you produce goods only when demand is there. Isn’t this fascinating?

How RevOps helps with demand forecasting

Leveraging CRM

Let’s say, your revenue leaders wish to make key business decisions based on the forecast results, but the data silos are making this task challenging.

After all, as per Sugarcrm, 59% of manufacturing companies find it difficult to gather accurate data for manufacturing demand forecasting.

It’s the CRM that helps them with real-time data through dynamic capturing, and data centralization, helping make informed decisions. It also gives the team leaders an overall view of the team’s forecast.

Through trend analysis, real-time updates, and better sales pipeline visibility, your resource planning improves.

Salesforce recommends using CRM over spreadsheets for better results.

Here’s a checklist of common mistakes to avoid in CRM implementation to enhance your operational efficiency.

Data centralization

As you just saw, one of the features offered by CRM  is data centralization. And with that, you’ve interdepartmental data in one place, enhancing your decision-making for the upcoming scenarios.

This facilitates data consistency, improved data quality, and an integrated view of influencing factors.

Moreover, the advanced methods used for forecasting like machine learning, data mining, and AI-based models require huge volumes of data to yield meaningful insights. Data centralization plays an important role here as well.

To unify data, you can create and use HubSpot datasets. This feature assimilates your data from across HubSpot accounts and helps build custom reports.

Collaborative forecasting

A manufacturing firm often suffers from misalignment between teams due to the decisions taken in isolation. For instance, the sales team may overcommit which the production team may not be able to fulfill.

Another scenario could be, focusing solely on financial inputs. Now this may hide the real issues behind the curtains. 

The solution is to bring in real-world operations insights into the financial forecasting process. And for this, Mckinsey recommends, “Bringing a real-world edge to forecasting”.

RevOps helps break the interdepartmental silos by aligning the sales & production teams through collaborative forecasting and unified strategy making. 

This becomes possible through the integration of data from all stakeholders, conducting a joint review after each sales cycle, and monitoring KPIs.

Market expansion 

To be able to expand, you need to drive profit margins consistently and meet the requirements of a broader audience. RevOps can help with expansion and global reach through website upgradation, customized templates, and targeted marketing efforts.

RevOps also empowers you with accurate revenue forecasting, informed resource allocation, unified GTM strategy, and optimized sales and marketing funnels.

Furthermore, to sustain global business and meet revenue targets consistently, it’s important to build revenue Ops skills and fulfill its requirements.

Through software and technologies

The predictive ability of RevOps increases multifold through data analysis and accelerated reporting across revenue-generating units.

Forecasting requires centralized and well-managed manufacturing data, attainable through Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. It facilitates interdepartmental data integration and management for procurement, inventory, supply chain, sales, and financial planning.

The image below depicts enterprise resource planning use cases for sales.

The 6 key benefits of ERP are as follows:

✅ Higher productivity
✅ Deeper insights 
✅ Accelerated reporting
✅ Lower risk
✅ Simpler IT
✅ Improved agility

Some of the popular software used for ERP are SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP), Microsoft Dynamics 365, NetSuite, and Infor CloudSuite Industrial.

It's a wrap

Forecasting is the magic potion offered by RevOps in the competitive manufacturing landscape. It not only helps you get past the supply chain hurdles but scale your business as well.

However, it needs structured historical data collection and key steps like integration, migration, and centralization. 

Post that, you need to implement CRM to draw meaningful insights and track the overarching progress in your forecasting endeavors.

This is where our pool of RevOps experts chip in as the buddies you can count on. They will take care of your demand forecasting needs to improve your operational efficiency and profit margins.