There are some commonalities that are shared by all demand planning, analytics and forecasting roles, including the levels of maturity. When you fully understand the maturity levels, you can assess your technology, process and people against a set of specific, external best practices, next practices and benchmarks. The fact is knowing your current level of maturity is absolutely essential to further development.
How Is Maturity Determined?
When it comes to determining your level of maturity in demand planning, you have to evaluate your organization across several domains and a number of maturity levels. When you look specifically at the actual demand planning function, you can find the three broad levels mentioned above: next level, essential and vanguard planning function and predictive analytics.
Keep in mind, just because you have a culture and people who are at the next level, your technology may still be stuck at the earlier stages in the stage of essential. With that in mind, when you are able to do an honest assessment, you can properly plan and forecast for the future.
Why Is Maturity So Important?
As your company grows, it needs to become more mature. If it doesn’t, you may become stagnant, with growth coming to a complete standstill. This isn’t ideal in any industry. With the benchmarking mentioned above, you can see where you are in various areas of your business and organization, which lets you know if any changes need to be made to reinvigorate your growth and development.
As you can see, maturity in demand planning is absolutely essential. If this is a factor you haven’t considered in the past, now is the time to do so. It helps ensure you get the desired results from your company.
