Retail Demand Planning Before, During, and After Crisis
Retail Demand Planning Before, During, and After Crisis
Yogi Berra is often quoted as saying, “The future ain’t what it used to be.” Steve Jobs echoed the same sentiment as a preface to his optimistic extrapolations predicting the future of technology. In today’s world, this couldn’t be closer to the truth. Three years ago, in the early days of the global COVID-19 pandemic, The Parker Avery Group hosted our Reconstructing Retail webinar series, with a focus on people, inventory management, and retail planning. We outlined how very different demand planning will be for retailers and consumer brands—not only the outcome but the elements involved in creating these critical predictions.
We discussed three phases and outlined specific tools and actions that retailers could take in order to prepare for and predict the future:
While the pandemic is thankfully in the past, we are still impacted by current geopolitical events. As such, it is important to revisit lessons learned from the COVID-19 crisis in the context of the three phases our experts outlined in mid-2020 to provide a blueprint for navigating future disruptions.
Learn and Assess
Most of us have adapted to major changes by learning from the past, but the first few months of the pandemic put us in an interesting position. Retail (and the world) as we knew it had never seen anything like COVID-19, so learning from the past was likely not an option. The future was not certain, and many retailers were learning and adapting in real-time.
One of the first things retailers noticed coming out of the COVID-19 crisis was that their sales patterns looked significantly different than in previous years because traditional forecasting systems rely heavily on historical sales. Further, varying levels of intervention are required with many of the forecasting systems on which retailers and consumer goods companies rely. This is especially true with traditional time-series-bas