Demand Planning Comes to Dynamics 365, for a Premium Price

• Demand Planning is a new AI- and query tool-based application that helps planners ensure future customer demand is met.
• The app fills an important supply chain feature gap that could help customers retire third-party solutions.
• Demand Planning is licensed through a new Supply Chain Management Premium subscription, marking a trend toward higher-priced subscriptions.

The new Demand Planning app (module) for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management uses advanced query tools and AI features to simplify generating product demand forecasts and optimizing inventory levels. The app is licensed via a new SCM Premium User Subscription License (User SL), although users with lower-level subscriptions have read-only rights to the forecast data and plans. SCM Premium is significantly more expensive than the standard SCM User SL, but it could prove to be less expensive than maintaining and paying for third-party solutions, and it is supported directly by Microsoft. 

Demand Planning

Demand planning is a supply chain management process that attempts to predict future sales of an organization’s products and then builds plans for meeting those demands. The plans are often complex, as they are built by collecting data from internal and external sources, such as historical sales data, inventory levels, warehouse capacities, and manufacturing capacities and schedules. The goal of demand planning is to ensure a company has sufficient inventory levels to meet customer demand, stored and delivered from the right locations, without having excess surplus.