Demand Forecasting with an Item Master Plan

You can enter the demand forecast by plan period directly into an item master plan or a channel master plan.

You can also modify automatically generated forecast data.

If the demand patterns are very irregular, you must not use LN to calculate the demand forecast. The calculation only works, if the start date of the scenario is sufficiently far in the past. The calculation takes trends and seasonal patterns into account. For details about this method, see To compute the demand forecast.

You can define sales budgets in the Statistics module of Sales. You can use the Copy Sales Budget to Demand Forecast (cpdsp1280m000) session to copy these sales budgets to the demand forecast of an item or item/channel combination.

Use an OLE interface to download data from external sales forecast applications (such as a spreadsheet) into Enterprise Planning.

Instead of entering or generating a regular demand forecast, you can also enter or generate a forecast as extra demand.

You can use the extra demand to simulate an increased demand level. After the simulation run, you can decide to delete the extra demand or to add it to the normal demand forecast with the Copy Demand, Supply or Inventory Plan session.

If you expect a one-time demand for a specific reason (such as a special sales action), you can enter this demand in the Special Demand by Item (cpdsp2100m000) session. Here you can enter special demand for an item or a particular item/channel combination. Moreover, you can record a reason for each occurrence of special demand. Special demand is also taken into account in item master plans and channel master plans.

You can use the Aggregate Channel to Item Master Plan (cpdsp5210m000) session to aggregate demand plans for channels to the corresponding item master plan.