Creating Demand Plan Proposal

Before starting

All forecasters must make their Market Forecast Proposal available for the current forecasting cycle to the administrator.

See Performing Market Forecasting.

Follow the steps

This process is iterative, except for the first step. These are the basic activities you must perform, but the sequence and number of iterations can vary:

1. Verifying Market Forecast Proposals

   In this activity, the administrator must verify that all forecasters have returned a Market Forecast Proposal. If some forecasters return their Market Forecast Proposal as compressed files, load the compressed files into the version.

2. Defining Favorite Views

   To analyze the Market Forecast Proposals, the administrator requires appropriate Favorite Views. These are defined in this activity. Advanced Favorite Views are usually required to display more than one dataset and scenario simultaneously.

   See Generating Forecast Packages and About filters.

3. Analyzing, adjusting, and validating Market Forecast Proposals

   In this activity, the administrator decides which scenario parts from the Market Forecast Proposals to include in the Sales Forecast Proposal. The administrator must analyze the changes and add new changes if required. The outcome is that the administrator identifies the scenario parts for the Sales Forecast Proposal.

   See Performing Market Forecasting.

4. Combining into Sales Forecast Proposal

   In this activity, you create the Sales Forecast Proposal. The proposal consists of all scenarios. Each scenario includes scenario parts where all changes are validated and accepted by the administrator and the forecasters to make up the Sales Forecast Proposal. You can display the combined Sales Forecast Proposal by using an advanced Favorite View. All required datasets are included, and each scenario is linked to its respective dataset.

   See Create Scenario Part and Attach/Detach Sales Activity.

Outcome

The administrator and the forecasters accept and confirm the Sales Forecast Proposal. The proposal includes all scenario parts that have been accepted to form the Demand Plan Proposal.

The Sales Forecast Proposal is consolidated during the consensus process. This process ensures agreement on one Updated Sales Budget and Sales Forecast throughout the supply chain.

Data import and any forecast activities performed in M3 DMP do not affect M3 Business Engine. M3 BE is affected only when data is exported from M3 DMP.

See Exporting Consolidated Sales Forecast Proposal.