Know what your business will need next.

Demand forecasting software predicts what a business will need to make, hold or sell in a future period. It matters because every downstream decision inherits the demand number: production plans, purchase orders, safety stock and staffing all start from it. In most organisations demand is planned as last year plus a percentage, adjusted by whoever argues most convincingly in the meeting — and nobody can say which assumption the plan actually rests on. An unexamined forecast propagates its error through the entire operation.

We do not publish an accuracy figure, and we would treat any vendor who does with caution — accuracy depends entirely on your data history, demand volatility and product mix, so a number from someone else's operation tells you nothing about yours. What we can commit to is that the forecast is explainable: you can see whether a change came from trend, seasonality, a promotion or a known event, which is what lets a planner judge whether to trust it.

Enough to cover the seasonal cycles that matter to you — for most manufacturers and retailers that means at least a couple of years, so an annual pattern can be separated from a trend. Less history does not make it useless, but seasonality and promotional lift become harder to separate, and the honest position is that the forecast will be weaker until the data catches up.