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Stock Seasonality Software

Seasonal demand

What causes seasonality in demand?

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 winter coats or shovels).

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.

How do you identify seasonal demand?

identify seasonal demand
  • Check if you can see the same demand pattern year-on-year.
    Analyze the correlation between each year, and if there’s an underlying pattern, the item has seasonal demand.
  • Check if the change in demand is a seasonal variance and not just an upward or downward trend over time.
    If it’s a trend rather than seasonality, see if demand still increases if you ignore the seasonal demand trend.
  • Check if the seasonal demand is strong enough to need treating differently.
    If the variance isn’t very big, you might not need to apply seasonal forecasting, but if there is a significant variance, you should treat it differently.

How do you handle seasonal demand?

Seasonal factors can affect your customers’ purchasing habits, so it’s essential to consider these changes when forecasting to:

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  • Ensure you have sufficient levels of stock to meet increases in product demand at peak times of the year and avoid stockouts.
  • Avoid needing to heavily discount or write off stock or incur additional holding costs until the following year’s increase in demand.

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.

Seasonal demand forecasting software

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 manage it for you.

With EazyStock’s seasonal demand forecasting functionality, you can ensure you have the right items on your shelves to maximize sales opportunities while preventing a build up of excess stock when the season ends.

Seasonal demand profiles

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.

Review. Adjust. Repeat.

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.

Adding seasonal demand forecasting to new products

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.

No more seasonal surprises

Make smart business decisions year-round by converting seasonable demand into reasonable demand with our powerful forecasting software
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Forecast

Ditch the spreadsheets and automate demand forecasting. Our best-in-breed algorithms generate highly accurate forecasts that account for seasonality, demand trends and promotions.

Multi-location management software

EazyStock’s smart, multi-location functionality ensures you have optimal levels of the right stock in the right place every time.

Sales promotion forecasting

EazyStock’s sales promotion functionality allows you to add campaigns to your demand forecasts for optimum forecasting accuracy.