Techniques for New Product Introduction in Demantra 7.3.0.1

Question

Hi,
In Demantra 7.3.0.1 there are two ways for New Product Introduction:-
1) Demand Planner: Member & chaining management
2) Collaborative Workbench: Create Similar product
Can someone please tell me the pros and cons of each technique.
The new product introduction will be handled by our clients, so I wanted to know if all the required features can be handled by just one method so we can propose that to be used by the client. Or do we need to use both techniques for different scenarios?
As I understand with Chaining one can link one item to many sites at one go, while with CW the similar item is created linked to one particular location.
Also CW allows for adding cannibalization factor which is not accounted for in chaining.
Apart from this it would be really helpful if someone could throw some more light on the issue.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi Gaurav,
I personally feel that 'Create Similar product' is a much required improvement over the original way of NPI using Member & Chaining Management.
Also with CW as well, a new and similar item created can also be linked to multiple location, same as Source Item, depending on the filters used in the Worksheet from which the create similar product is invoked.
some of the PROS and CONS of the 2 methods are as follows:
Demand Planner: Member & chaining management
Pros: 1) Can be used to specify the time range for copying the history date.
2) Can be used to specify the Percentage by which the source data needs to be adjusted while copying into the target combination
3) An important feature is that this can be used to do chaining at an aggregated level.
Cons: 1) It takes a long time to setup a New Member, combination and Chaining relationship.
     2) High User involvement since user has to perform muliptle tasks and more error prone.
Collaborative Workbench: Create Similar product
Pros: 1) User-friendly
2) Users needs to enter a few datapoints in single form and does not need to navigate through multiple forms/screens
3) Ability to specify Cannibalization parameters as well as Launch dates
4) Good performance.
5) Ongoing Chaining
6) When coupled with features like 'End of Lifecycle date', it provides a complete Business solution           
Cons: 1) Can not be used for only performing Chaining.
2) While it can be used to create a New Similar Product, it cannot be used to create a new similar Customer based on an existing item-location combination data. This,though, may not be a very common scenario.
3) Apart from copying other Item attributes, the method also copies the same 'Item Description' level from source to the new similar product, which sometimes can be very confusing.
Hope this helps.
Thanks,
Rohit Goyal