Nov 4, 2026

Integrating promotional planning with sales forecasting

An integrated planning platform helps a leading dairy company turn marketing, promotional, and pricing decisions into a single sales forecast.

At a glance

Challenge

Promotional, pricing and sales planning ran in separate, manual processes, leading to sales forecasts not fully reflecting the full commercial plan.

Solution

An integrated planning process, supported by a web platform with role-specific cockpits and forecasting modules, connects marketing, promotional and pricing decisions to a single sales forecast.

Results

Forecast accuracy improved by ~5 pp and bias fell to ~1%, benefiting from more than 45,000 market signals included in the forecasting model.

Challenge

A leading dairy company planned promotions, prices and sales across separate teams and processes. Marketing objectives, promotional guidelines, client-level actions and product launches were defined in different files and reached the demand planning team late or incompletely.

As a result, sales forecasts did not fully reflect the commercial plan and promotional impact was hard to anticipate. Planners spent much of their time consolidating abundant but dispersed data rather than analysing it. The company needed a single, consistent forecast that captured the impact of every commercial lever, and a process that kept all teams aligned.

Solution

LTPlabs designed an integrated planning process and built a web platform to support it end to end. The process starts with marketing objectives and promotional guidelines, moves through the promotional calendar by client, and ends with the validation of a single sales forecast, with clear roles and timings for each team.

Nine role-specific cockpits let each team record and consult the information it owns: promotional actions and their investment conditions, pricing simulations, product launches and transitions, marketing events and export deals.

A central data repository, integrated with the company’s systems, consolidates orders, sales, pricing and stock data.

The forecasting engine separates baseline and promotional demand, estimates promotional uplift and automatically selects the best-performing method for each product segment. Team inputs are reflected in the forecast every day, and validated forecasts and pricing conditions are integrated into the company’s ERP.

On top of the technological stack, a governance model supports continuous improvement, with an annual review of objectives and promotional guidelines, a monthly cycle to review the promotional calendar and align forecasts, and daily monitoring of forecasts and alerts.

Adoption was phased: teams first validated outputs, fine-tuned processes, and received training; the platform was then extended to more teams and is now being rolled out to more geographies.

Results

Planning became a shared process. The planning platform integrated more than 45,000 market signals with direct impact on forecasts, leading to an improvement on forecasting accuracy of ~5 p.p. More than 400 products are managed in the platform, and over 20 dashboards give users real-time visibility of forecasts, promotions and performance.

With one forecast that reflects marketing, promotional and pricing decisions, the company can see the expected impact of each commercial lever before acting on it.

Case Studies