In 2004, AMR coined the term Demand Signal Repository (DSR) as a common database that harmonizes and cleanses downstream data, including point of sales (POS), inventory movement data, shopper demographics, market trends, and loyalty. It is a powerful enterprise data warehouse that stores large volumes of external and internal data that has been harmonized to provide visibility up and down the supply network. It can also be used to feed line-of-business applications that support demand-driven supply networks. A DSR stores retailer data, third-party data, and internal data in order to drive demand-driven business insights across the value chain of stakeholders. The various retailer data sources could include: point of sales scan data, store and DCs inventories, planograms, store clusters, retail item hierarchies, and events. The internal data sources can take the form of sales, promotions, events, item hierarchies and attributes, store/location hierarchies, forecasts, and shipments. DSR can also help in storing third party data such as syndicated data, weather data, and map/spatial data.
Using these data sources, DSR helps to create a central database for demand sources and allows the use of business analytics to gain insights for decision making.
The following figures show the trends (as of 2007) pertaining to DSR in consumer packaged goods industry.