Reliable demand planning is essential for maintaining product availability, managing inventory, supporting procurement, and preparing production. Yet many organizations still depend on complex Excel workbooks, manual coordination, and disconnected data sources. At the same time, real-world experience shows that demand planning is never entirely standardized. Planning levels, influencing factors, responsibilities, and calculation methods vary significantly between organizations.

In this session, I will demonstrate how the Microsoft Demand Planning app can be combined with Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management to establish a structured yet flexible planning process. The session is based on lessons learned from a real production implementation.

We will follow the complete process: importing historical data from Dynamics 365, transforming and aggregating operational data, and calculating a forecast. We will then explore how planners can review, comment on, manually adjust, and compare planning scenarios. Finally, we will look at how approved planning results can be transferred back to Dynamics 365 and used in downstream supply-chain processes.

Additional topics include incorporating external influencing factors and custom forecasting models, handling outliers, configuring row-level access, and managing time fences, time freezes, and phase-in/phase-out scenarios during product transitions.

The session goes beyond a product feature overview. It focuses on the practical decisions required during an implementation: Which business and technical questions need to be answered? Where does the standard application already work well? Which requirements require additional configuration or custom solutions? And what foundations must be established regarding data quality, responsibilities, and the overall planning process?

Attendees will leave with a practical understanding of the architecture, process, and capabilities of the Demand Planning app, as well as concrete guidance for evaluating and implementing it within their own organization.

This session is based on experience from a real customer project in which Arineo became the first German Microsoft partner to put the Microsoft Demand Planning app into production. The customer’s identity, business data, and confidential project information will be anonymized or replaced with demonstration data.

The session is vendor-neutral and does not contain a sales presentation. It provides a practical and balanced view of the solution’s capabilities, architecture, implementation decisions, and current limitations. Depending on the technical conditions at the venue, the application will be demonstrated live or through a prepared recording.

Recommended duration: 45–60 minutes.
Target audience: Demand and supply planning professionals, Dynamics 365 consultants, solution architects, project managers, and Power Platform professionals.
Level: Intermediate.