Forecast being the base of any demand planning and further supply scheduling processes, needs a mechanism to have a control on the process of predicting forecast. This can be achieved by utilizing the functionality of your demand planning tool to monitor forecasting process.The need of adjusting tool’s parameters to create quantitatively more accurate forecast is always there, but besides that a Demand Analyst need to capture all those SKUs for which the forecast being generated is not healthy enough.
Statistical Process Control: A tool to monitor forecasting process, identifying those SKUs whose forecast error is going out of set of limits and those whose error are under control.
Benefits: Reduces time required by Analysts for forecast analysis and lets him focus on area of concern instead of wandering through all the SKUs.
Set Performance indicators like health signals for forecast and define alerts/exception raising conditions, say:
Forecast Accuracy <>
95% <> 95% Medium Level AlertAutomated Alerts/
Exceptions: Create setup for invoking alerts/exceptions automatically as and when required during the demand planning cycle. Ex. Raising alerts just after forecasting engine completes batch run, raising alerts after final forecast is approved, and so on.
Notifications: Configure your tool to send automated notifications to concerned business users to keep them updated with what chunk of data they should be analyzing for resolving the raised alerts.
Here is an example of how the same can be achieved by using Oracle’s Demantra application:
Customization Required:
Option1:- Create Exception worksheets with all the SKUs data in it, with Forecast accuracy related series- Put exception condition & Save worksheet definition- Create a workflow with exception step which can be launched by analyst using a Level method from worksheet or directly from Workflow manager page. - Send alerts to Analyst for any exceptions found
Option2:- Create Exception worksheets with all the SKUs data in it, with Forecast accuracy related series- Put required exception conditions- Write custom code to call up run workflow at end of every forecasting cycle.- Send alerts to Analyst for any exceptions found by calling these custom codes
