September 2024 - What's New at Confido
September's focus was building advanced forecasting features as brands are in the thick of annual planning season. Confido's new features this month help you build accuracy in forecasting workflows through Ship-To adjustments, Launch SKU Enhancements, and forecast suggestions.
Launch SKU Enhancements
When a brand gets a new distribution, the ordering patterns and velocities are often different from steady state. Initially a distributor will order much more than usual as they are attempting to fill the shelves of stores and build up safety stock. In addition, velocity is affected since customers won’t initially pull as much product off the shelf as it may take some time to encourage trial and build awareness of the new product.
Confido's Launch SKU Enhancements accounts for these patterns and behaviors through Pipefills and Ramp Periods, to enable more accurate forecasting near term and steady state.
- Pipefills: Initially a distributor will order much more than usual; Confido incorporates this as Pipefill, an order adjustment used to to fill the initial shelves.
- Ramp Period: For velocity, Confido incorporates a ramp period to account for number of weeks that it will take to reach the target velocity on the shelf.
Let's walk through it!
After the information is inputted, Confido will display a table that details the impact that the new SKU launch has on the sales forecast, as well as the impact of the Pipefill on the Ship-to forecast.
Improved Sales Forecasting Recommendations
Confido will suggest sales forecasting edits based on historical data in the system. With the improved forecasting recommendations, Confido recommends adjustments in velocity and stores, while users are able to approve or dismiss these changes on a case by case basis.
Ship To Forecast with Adjustment Capabilities
When forecasting shipments, rolling up consumption is a solid first step. However, there's a lot of nuance to what drives shipments beyond consumption, like inventory at a distribution center, pipe fills, and out-of-stocks. Confido's new order adjustment feature allows you to account for these nuances by adjusting orders up or down to get a more accurate shipment forecast
New Account Planner Summary
Account Planners make it dead-simple for sales users to seamlessly manage their accounts in one view, and allow other users (finance, leadership) to monitor key performance indicators for an account in one standardized view.
This month, we added the item summary and financial summary table, as well as the ability to create new trade promotions directly on the account.
DC Allocation
Brands can use several distribution channels (UNFI, KeHE, DPI, or Direct) to place their product to the end retailer, and each retailer can pull through a variety of Distribution Centers, which creates complexity in demand planning.
Confido now allows users to forecast demand by Distribution Center, to help optimize inventory levels by location, freight routes, and manage DC level inventory levels. The video below shows how to configure DC allocation for a Planning Group to specify the shipment volume for each DC of each RTM/distributor.
Deduction Rules
Accounting teams often review payments that have countless lines due to splitting, which is great given the granular level of detail, but can also be challenging to determine which deductions should be "flagged" (disputed, requesting backup, sent to another team member, etc).
Instead of manually reviewing and setting the statuses each time, Confido's Deduction Rules allows the user to automate the status, ensuring that each deduction is reviewed and sent off to the right place.
Below is an example of a rule set up where Deductions over $1,000 are disputed, and Deductions between $0 to $1,000 are Sent to Ops. This gives an extra pair of eyes to ensure that no deduction is overlooked.
Bug fixes and Enhancements
Confido is constantly making small improvements and bug fixes - here's some of them.
- Improved check processing for McLane
- Improved deduction approval assignments
- Added support for UNFI terms disputes
- Added support for txt backup via email
- Created next and previous buttons on the deduction modal view
- Resolved downloading draft promos in CSV format
- Added filter for accruals by accrual period
- Improved product filter for the Net Sales View
- Updated promo creation and splitting to use company periods instead of months
- Added default setting to the net sales view
- Improved promo editing
- Added filtering by GL for accruals reporting
- Created apportioned spend for planning group collections to children
- Added the ability to change products in bulk promo duplication
- Added forecast side to the new ship-to view
- Added export options to ship-to forecast
- Added CSV upload to opportunities
