Demand Segmentation

Demand Segmentation Software That Plans Pharma Demand the Way It Behaves

Hospital, retail and tender demand don't behave alike. Plan them apart.

PLAIO Demand Planner with the demand plan grouped by channel into Hospital, Retail Pharmacy and Tender, month by month

Your forecast isn't wrong. It's averaged.

Take a portfolio forecast bias of −0.5%. It looks like a team doing its job. Cut the same demand by channel and it can turn out to be +3.0% on hospital and −3.2% on tender.

Two opposite problems quietly cancelling each other out, and neither of them getting fixed.

That is what happens when demand is planned at the level it is reported at instead of the level it behaves at. Hospital volume is contract-shaped. Retail pharmacy is seasonal.

Tender is lumpy, binary and enormous when it lands. Average them into one line per SKU and the plan is wrong in a different way every month.

Why it matters:

You can only fix a forecast problem you can see. Segmented demand shows you which part of the business to work on this month.

A portfolio bias of −0.5% grouped by channel: +3.0% on Hospital, +0.2% on Retail Pharmacy and −3.2% on Tender

What you can do with PLAIO's Demand Segmentation

Demand Dimensions list with Channel, Therapy Area and Customer switched on, Market switched off, and a new Tender Type dimension being added

Define the Segments That Matter

Channel, therapy area, customer, market: you define the demand dimensions your business actually plans by. It is your catalog, not a fixed list we ship.

Demand Plan re-cut by channel into Hospital, Retail, Tender, Specialty Pharmacy, Wholesale and Institutional

Re-cut the Whole Plan in a Click

Switch the grouping and the entire demand hierarchy re-cuts along the dimension you picked. No rebuild, no export, and no second plan to keep in step.

Forecast Accuracy of 91.2% overall, with a bar per channel and Tender highlighted at a +8.3% bias

Measure Accuracy Segment by Segment

Forecast accuracy, error and bias report against the same dimensions as the plan, so a healthy portfolio number cannot hide two unhealthy segments.

How demand segmentation works in PLAIO

Demand grouped by therapy area above the demand node table, where each node carries its location, channel and therapy area

The segment lives on the demand node

A demand node is item × location × your dimensions, and the dimensions are part of the node’s identity rather than a tag added afterwards. The same SKU can be hospital demand in one market and tender demand in another, and the plan treats them as the different things they are.

Your dimension catalog, not ours

Channel and therapy area are examples, not built-ins. The catalog is defined per customer, and a value that is not in it is rejected rather than quietly creating a new node, so segments stay clean as the data grows.

One plan, many cuts

The grouping selector offers product family, location and item alongside every dimension that has values on your nodes. Pick one and the plan, the drill-downs and the numbers all follow. The same demand, seen the way you need to see it.

See it in Demand Planning

Forecast Accuracy

Accuracy reported the same way the plan is cut

Accuracy, error and bias grouped by the same dimensions your plan uses.
A portfolio number you can open up, rather than one you have to take on trust.
Accuracy tracked over time per segment, so an improvement is provable and not anecdotal.

Why it matters:

The forecast review stops being a conversation about one number and becomes a conversation about which segment to fix first.

Explore AI, ML & Optimization

PLAIO's Forecast Accuracy view: overall error of 7.2% trending toward zero, overall bias of −0.5%, and the error and bias trend from March to August

Demand Segmentation FAQ

Demand segmentation is planning and measuring demand at the level it actually behaves at, rather than the level it happens to be reported at. In pharma that usually means splitting a SKU's demand by channel, therapy area, customer or market, because a hospital contract, a retail pharmacy season and a tender award follow completely different patterns.

Whichever ones matter to you. The dimension catalog is defined per customer, so channel and therapy area are examples rather than a fixed list. Alongside your own dimensions, the plan can always be grouped by product family, location and item.

No. There is one demand plan. The segments are part of each demand node's identity, so changing the grouping re-cuts the plan you already have instead of creating a parallel copy to reconcile.

Yes. The Forecast Accuracy dashboard groups accuracy, error and bias by the same dimensions the plan uses. That is how a portfolio bias close to zero gets exposed as two opposite errors in different channels.

They come in with your demand data, from your ERP or from the spreadsheets you plan with today, and are registered in the dimension catalog first. A value that is not in the catalog is rejected rather than quietly creating a new demand node, which keeps a misspelt channel from turning into a phantom segment.

No, and deliberately so. You define the dimensions your business plans by, because they usually follow commercial and regulatory structures that only your team knows. PLAIO's job is to carry them through the plan, the drill-downs and the accuracy reporting without you maintaining a separate model for each one.

Plan demand the way it behaves

See your own channels, therapy areas and markets cut out of one demand plan, and the forecast accuracy behind each of them.

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