AI-assisted sales target planning
A commercial team set the next cycle's targets for 106 pharmacy chains across 6 brands in about three hours — work that had taken several working days. In one two-hour session they put 214 business questions to their own data, roughly one answered question every 34 seconds.
Sep 18, 2026 · Vladimir Simeonov
Results at a glance
- full target-setting cycle, against several working days
- ~3 hrs
- pharmacy chains covered
- 106
- brands planned in parallel
- 6
- business questions processed in one 2-hour session
- 214
Working cadence: one answered business question every 34 s, sustained across the session.
01 — The challenge
Target setting ran one brand, one chain, one spreadsheet at a time.
Each planning cycle began with an extract request. Sell-in history, sell-out by chain, prior-year attainment and chain-level agreements lived in separate systems, and the planning team reconciled them brand by brand in spreadsheets.
Every "what if we moved this chain up 5%?" meant another pass through the data and another wait on an analyst. The cycle stretched across several working days, and by the end of it the assumptions at the start were no longer the ones being discussed.
Sell-in history
ERP extract, per brand
On request
Sell-out by chain
106 chains, mixed formats
Monthly
Prior-year attainment
Planning spreadsheets
Per cycle
Chain agreements
Commercial terms, shared drive
Untracked
02 — Where the numbers come from
Four sources, one model, one conversation.
Sources
Pharmalyze model
Brands × chains × periods, reconciled nightly
In the session
Ask a target question in plain language
Read the answer as metric cards and progress-vs-target
Commit the number, move to the next chain
03 — In the app
A planning session is a conversation, not an export.
The team worked straight through the chain list in chat. Each question returned the brand's sell-in for the period, its position against the current target and the prior-year comparison — enough to set a number and move on.
Because every answer came from the same model, the six brands were planned in parallel rather than in sequence, and nothing had to be re-reconciled at the end.
04 — Before and after
One cycle, measured the same way twice.
- Industry
- Pharmacy retail & distribution
- Market
- Europe
- Scope
- 106 chains · 6 brands
- Planning cadence
- Quarterly target setting