Manufacturing Planning and Control - Demand Management

For any business, it is quite important to estimate the demand over a period and work on fulfilling the demand and earn your revenues. In a typical Manufacturing industry, demand management is one important function. Your leadership as well as the middle management works extensively to ensure demand management works to the best extent. Because the inputs from this function drive the rest of activities in your business.

Demand Management is the gateway function in MPC, providing link to market place, sister plants, warehouses and other important customers. From demand management we get the information from and about the market through activities like forecasting customer demand, order capturing and determining your product requirements.

Through this function, company communicates with customers, makes accurate order promise dates and communicate changes if any.

It is also concerned with identifying the sources of demand for production capacity, service part demands, intra-company and inter-plant requirements and other needs for Inventory build-up or other needs for pipeline inventory stocking.

This course explains the functions of Demand Management in a typical manufacturing industry.

• You will be first briefed on the context of this course. Demand management function, it's components and positioning in the overall Manufacturing Planning and Control cycle are explained in this section.

• Before we understand Demand Management, you need to know the most popular manufacturing environments in practice. Hence the next sessions provides an overview of major manufacturing environments such as Make to stock, Make to order etc and demand management approach in each of them

• In the next section, you will know how Demand management functions interact with other functions within MPC as well as external touch points such as Market and Customer.

• There is lot of information required before you make any planning. You will go through important aspects of information required for Demand Management.

• In the next section, you will go through using forecast information for different planning levels during Demand Management.

• You will run through some aspects of developing and evaluating forecasting. You will also go through explanation of some popular forecasting methods along with illustration.

• You will be presented some case studies to get more understanding on demand management in multiple scenarios