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Demand forecasting pays off for Kimberly-Clark

by Paul Taylor

Financial Times

September 10, 2011

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In a recent Financial Times interview, Greg Schroeder, Kimberly-Clark’s senior manager for the supply chain center of excellence, explained how Terra’s Demand Sensing enables Kimberly-Clark to use downstream data to sustain an agile supply chain despite disruptions like those that trailed Hurricane Irene up the U.S. eastern seaboard late in August 2011.

“Our forecast, like everyone else, was terrible throughout that week because no one could predict [the storm’s] consequences. But where we differ now from others is that this technology provides us with an ability to understand every day what retailers and customers were doing as they began to get back to some sense of normalcy. What is different now is that because we have access to point-of-sale data and can see the demand that our retailers are facing, we are able to better predict what those orders are going to look like. 

As a result of our ability to tap into this point-of-sale activity, we are now in a position to answer questions like, ‘What is the recovery at the retailer level?’ or ‘How are consumers reacting?’ and then make sure that we have got stock in position to support that. 

As a result, our need to ship product from the west coast to the east coast at the last minute on a rush truck as opposed to rail because we anticipated demand wrongly is reduced. We have been able to better handle variables and generally have stock in the right place to meet variables, because we have reduced the incidence of inaccurate forecasts.”