Connected Demand Planning for Multichannel Forecasting Success at GoPro

The demand planners at GoPro were working in a spreadsheet environment to create their sales forecasts. Managing multiple files was time-consuming, led to errors, and brought communication challenges. Also, their channel business was being forecasted with a different process from what was being used for their e-commerce business. As a result, there was less time available to spend on enriching their forecasts and focusing on accuracy. Additionally, not enough attention could be paid to the accessories forecasting process, which is a large part of GoPro’s business. 

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Utilizing their newly deployed Anaplan solution, GoPro has achieved several positive results:

• The forecasting process for the channel and e-commerce businesses are now combined, increasing efficiency and decreasing the time required to get a complete company-wide forecast from weeks to days.
• Spreadsheet based business processes have been eliminated.
• Attach rates are now being consistently applied to all accessories products, enabling a much better forecast at the accessories level.
• GoPro is now managing inventory build based on total system inventory, including on hand within channel.

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GoPro partnered with Accelytics to develop a connected planning system in Anaplan to eliminate their old spreadsheet-based business processes. The focus was on combining what was being done with their channel business with the best practices being performed from the ecommerce side. An important element of this was tracking sell in and sell through actuals and forecasts separately, and attaching the correct rates to better understand what the accessories forecasts should be. 

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