Demand Planning Overview

GoldFinch Demand Planning helps businesses anticipate customer demand, maintain appropriate inventory levels, and plan purchasing, production, and inventory transfers more effectively—all within Salesforce.

By bringing sales forecasts, customer orders, inventory availability, purchasing, and manufacturing requirements together, GoldFinch gives planners a connected view of future supply and demand.

Plan Demand with Greater Confidence

GoldFinch supports multiple ways to build and maintain sales forecasts:

• Enter forecasts manually
• Import forecasts from external planning sources
• Incorporate relevant Salesforce opportunity data
• Calculate forecasts using historical sales and item-usage patterns
• Adjust historical usage to account for unusual or nonrecurring activity

Forecasts can be maintained by item, warehouse, period, and unit of measure, helping businesses plan at the level appropriate for their operations.

Align Supply with Demand

GoldFinch Supply Planning evaluates expected demand against available and incoming supply. Depending on an item’s replenishment method, the system can recommend:

• Purchase Orders for externally sourced materials and products
• Work Orders for manufactured items
• Transfer Orders for inventory replenished from another warehouse

Planners can review and adjust recommendations before creating supply orders, ensuring that operational judgment remains part of the planning process.

Consider the Complete Supply-and-Demand Picture

GoldFinch can consider relevant sources of demand and supply, including:

Demand

• Open Sales Orders
• Sales Forecasts
• Work Order component requirements
• Transfer Order requirements
• Safety stock targets

Supply

• Current inventory
• Open Purchase Orders
• Open Work Orders
• Incoming Transfer Orders

This connected view helps planners identify potential shortages, excess inventory, and replenishment requirements earlier.

Support Multi-Level Manufacturing

For manufactured items, GoldFinch can evaluate multi-level formulas or bills of material to identify component requirements. This connects finished-goods demand with the raw materials, packaging, subassemblies, and outside services needed to support production.

Improve Forecast Accuracy

GoldFinch can use historical item usage and multiple forecasting models to determine which model best reflects each item's demand pattern.

Forecast consumption also helps prevent demand from being counted twice when both forecasts and actual customer orders exist for the same period.

Plan by Item and Warehouse

Planning parameters can be maintained for each item-and-warehouse combination, allowing businesses to account for differences such as:

• Lead times
• Safety stock requirements
• Reorder quantities
• Order multiples
• Preferred vendors
• Replenishment methods
• Purchasing responsibilities

This flexibility supports businesses with multiple warehouses, different sourcing strategies, and varied inventory requirements.

Key Benefits

GoldFinch Demand Planning can help organizations:

• Reduce stockouts and late fulfillment
• Avoid unnecessary purchasing and excess inventory
• Connect sales forecasts with purchasing and production
• Improve visibility into future material requirements
• Coordinate replenishment across multiple warehouses
• Give planners time to review recommendations before creating orders
• Keep planning data connected with Salesforce customer and operational information

Demand Planning on Salesforce

Because GoldFinch is built natively on Salesforce, demand planning operates alongside your sales, purchasing, inventory, manufacturing, and customer information. Teams can work from connected data without maintaining separate planning spreadsheets or disconnected applications.

GoldFinch Demand Planning helps businesses identify future requirements, understand the factors driving them, and take informed action to keep supply aligned with customer demand.