Considerations

Forecasting Date

Projected demand is updated for the next 12 months based on the forecasting date entered by the user.  The forecasting date is the period into which customer orders are currently being placed.  Normally, it is the date on which the monthly upload is done.  The projected demand entries are updated for the next 12 months, starting from the forecast date.

Selective Upload

Monthly upload can be done selectively for:

·      Warehouse (only parts belonging to a certain company and warehouse)

·      Part (a selected individual part)

·      Planner (all parts belonging to a certain company and planner)

·      All parts for the company (when no selection is made)

Demand Type

In Master Scheduling, projected demand for a specific period may be maintained for multiple demand sources.  The demand type for the projected demand is entered on the Monthly Upload Request screen before the data is uploaded.

Before updating projected demand for a month, the monthly upload process erases all the projected demand entries for the same month with the same demand type.  This is done to erase forecast generated previously by the forecasting application, so the latest forecast information can be loaded.  Therefore, it is recommended that you use special demand types for the forecasting application.  All manually entered forecasts will be erased unless they have different demand types than the one specified for monthly upload.

Frozen Forecasts

During the monthly upload process, the planner can freeze the projected demand quantities for a user-defined number of periods.

The number of periods to be frozen is defined on the Monthly Upload Request screen.  For example, if the planner enters 2, the projected demand quantities for the two months immediately after the forecasting date will not be updated.

Planners may use this facility to freeze the projected demand quantities for the coming few months in order to avoid fluctuations in the master schedules that cannot be handled in the short term.