Your sales data is lying to you

Sales, sales, sales

Sales data is the heartbeat of your business. More sales is great. Decreasing sales means stressful management meetings. But there’s an uncomfortable truth:

What you sold is not what your customers wanted to buy.

The silent killer: constrained sales

Let’s say you had 100 units in stock, but demand was actually 150.
Your system records 100 sales.
The other 50? Never recorded. They don’t appear in your sales figures.

That’s constrained sales in action—and it’s costing you money.

The consequence? Missed revenue

If you would create a forecast based on unconstrained demand, you’d be able to optimize your supply chain considerably. This avoids missed revenue because of fewer stockouts. Moreover it bumps your profitability as a result of increased efficiency throughout your supply chain.

The fix? Forecast based on true demand.

That’s what we call unconstrained demand forecasting.

With the right approach (and a bit of AI), you can:

• Reveal the real demand behind the numbers
• Forecast what customers would have ordered
• Align stock, production, and logistics accordingly
• Reduce last-minute supplier calls

How to approach this?

Easily said, but how do you measure this unconstrained demand? First of all, it’s often hard to get to the exact figure. This is because it’s not always easy to identify the cases where sales was lost for some reason. However, there are some things you can do to at least approximate your unconstrained demand.

Optimize your own supply chain

If you experience some of the challenges below, it might be interesting for you to have a look at demand forecasting. If your curious about Infofarm can assist, book a meeting with one of our forecasting specialists and we’ll walk you through it.