Dirty shoes, not dusty shoes. That's the goal for your athletic-shoe company. You want plenty of the former—shoes on customers' feet, getting dirty in active wear that will keep them coming back for more. And you must avoid the latter—unsold shoes gathering dust on your merchants' shelves.

The solution for your $1.3-billion retail company is a sophisticated demand-planning application that will help you better predict, meet and even influence customer demand. Implemented correctly, you can expect to improve your bottom line through more efficient manufacturing, smarter pricing and promotions, fewer lost sales and reduced inventory.

In this approach, your own developers will do much of the heavy coding chores, while a consultant concentrates on creating the algorithms and statistical-modeling tools that build up the application's intelligence. Five years of historical sales data will be needed to establish baseline points.

Corporate planners and sales managers can begin to evaluate scenarios late in the 12-month project cycle, and their feedback will further refine the Web-based application before it's fully launched in month 12. Your sales staff of 160 will be key users, so it's time to roll out that long overdue laptop upgrade for them. Development and refinements will continue in the first year of operations.

Done right, it can mean as much as a 5% to 10% improvement in gross sales after two years of operation, according to Patricia Walker, an analyst at Accenture. Done wrong, it can have a disastrous ripple effect across your supply chain, says Sharyn Leaver, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

"You can predict your demand perfectly," Leaver says, "but if you don't have the right number of shoes at the right locations, it won't do you much good."

To see the details behind this planner and fill in your own estimates, click on the Tool icon above and download the interactive worksheet.