Seasonal demand happens when an item experiences peaks and troughs in demand at certain times of the year, every year.
Seasonality in inventory planning can occur for many reasons; for example, an item may typically be sold during a festival, such as Christmas or Diwali, or predominantly used during warm weather (like sunscreen or patio furniture) or over colder months (like skiwear or de-icer).
Whatever the reason for the seasonality, items with seasonal demand can wreak havoc with your inventory forecasting and replenishment. Businesses that cannot accurately forecast seasonal demand often face issues with their stock levels. Under-forecasting can cause stockouts and lost sales during times of peak demand. Over-forecasting risks excess stock that needs to be discounted or written off at the end of a season.
It might sound obvious, but first, you need to understand when peaks happen. You can then adjust the demand accordingly before using it in a forecast calculation.
We recommend keeping seasonal demand and other variable factors separate from base demand calculations.
Next, you need to understand the level of uncertainty associated with your forecasted peaks to enable accurate forecasting.
Forecasting seasonal demand accurately allows you to gain an advantage over your competition and revel in the benefits.
Trying to forecast demand manually is hard enough without throwing seasonality into the equation. If you’re still unsure how to handle seasonal demand, let EazyStock’s AI functionality manage it for you.
With EazyStock’s seasonal demand forecasting functionality, you can ensure you have the right items on your shelves to maximise sales opportunities while preventing a build-up of excess stock when the season ends.
EazyStock makes it easy to identify and manage items influenced by seasonal demand. Thanks to advanced pattern analysis, EazyStock automatically detects items with seasonal demand – even low-volume and slow-moving SKUs.
It then calculates and assigns a seasonal demand profile to each one, allowing for grouping of similar profiles for ease of management.
With this information feeding into replenishment calculations, EazyStock ensures your stock levels reflect demand – no matter how much it fluctuates throughout the year.
Demand patterns and seasonal variations can change at any time. EazyStock continually checks every seasonal profile to ensure it accurately reflects an item’s current demand and that it’s improving overall forecasting accuracy. When this is not the case, you can ask EazyStock to either alert users or make automatic adjustments to get things back on track.
With EazyStock, it’s possible to add a seasonal profile to a new stock item with no demand history. Simply add the new item to a similar product group, and EazyStock will apply the seasonal profile without impacting the forecasting accuracy of the group.