How suppliers can align to retailers’ spring and summer seasonal demands

by | Feb 21, 2025 | Data Management, Inventory Management, Suppliers, Supply Chain

From egg-shaped candies at Easter to gardening tools in the spring, customer demands often change with the seasons. Spring and summer also inspire the launch of new product lines, targeted promotions and increased consumer spending, triggering demand fluctuations that significantly impact inventory management and sales.

For suppliers, adapting to seasonal demands helps you meet retailer expectations and capitalize on market opportunities. And when you align more closely with the demands of your retail trading partners, you can strengthen your relationships and optimize profits.

Read on for key strategies for suppliers to better align with retail seasonal demands.

Collect the data

Before you can plan for the future, you need to know where you’ve been. For suppliers, this means gathering complete and accurate sales and inventory information.

Ideally this would be a simple task—but in reality, suppliers face challenges including:

Limited data availability: If your information has been gathered or tracked with manual processes, or sales and inventory data is siloed in different systems, it’s not only difficult to gather complete information, but also an invitation for error. To ensure your data is clean, accessible and reliable, consider integrating your data into a centralized business platform.

Poor internal collaboration: When departments are siloed, forecasts can be derailed by misaligned goals and initiatives. Implementing Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP)—a monthly sync between marketing, production, inventory management and sales—enables you to coordinate all your business areas with shared goals for more effective forecasting.

Incomplete historical data: Having access to less than three years of historical transaction and inventory information—whether from outdated manual processes, rapid growth or changing personnel—may skew analysis due to sporadic or one-off trends rather than insights that are truly seasonal or situational.

Lack of visibility into retailer data: A true alignment with your retail trading partners requires access to their sell-through data. This not only gives you a better understanding of product demand, but also provides insights into seasonal trends by location, product or customer.

Analyze the trends

Once data has been collected and cleansed, demand planning and forecasting can follow.

Demand planning predicts upcoming demand for products, using the information gathered to adjust output, balance inventory levels and ensure you can fulfill your trading partners’ orders on time and in full without stockouts.

Innovative tools like SPS Analytics can help companies clean and apply market data quickly. To accurately predict needed inventory, analysts can use historical data and current trends to understand demand. With these insights, you can improve allocations and orders to match demand, maximize-sell through and stay on top of trends.

Communicate with your retailers

Including your trading partners in the forecasting process enables you to share your understanding of product demands and align with their business goals. This sharing of data-driven insights not only builds trust in your recommendations but also adds value to your partnerships.

To ensure you remain on the same page, it’s crucial to have reliable, timely communications.

Streamlined communications enable close collaboration with your trading partners and boost forecasting accuracy. EDI solutions with real-time communication channels allow you to consolidate and organize your supply chain and stay ahead of shifting demands.

Work your plan

When you’ve developed a clear picture of seasonal demands through solid forecasting, you can determine the necessary materials and equipment to meet your production goals and schedule production to meet your retailers’ needs.

To keep your forecast plans on track:

Coordinate labor and production timelines to ensure timely deliveries of products that meet retailer demands.

Maintain timely communications to ensure you’re sharing accurate information so you can adjust to meet shifting demands with an agile supply chain.

Reap the rewards, and repeat

When you use data-driven insights to forecast demand, collaborate with trading partners to adjust your production and supply plans, and align with shared goals and timely communications, you can look forward to not only better relationships, but maximized sales and profit.

SPS Commerce can support you with the tools and expertise needed to take advantage of this proven formula for successful demand planning that you can repeat in every season.

To learn more about how to implement demand planning into your supply chain, contact us to begin the process.

Morgan Asplund
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