Overview

The Sales Planning module was designed to have the planner focus on putting together a good sales plan. It provides a graphical user interface that can be modified adding or subtracting history or forecasts.

Within Sales Planning you are forecasting an item sold through a Customer Group. A Customer Group can be as simple as "All Customers" or as complicated as having a Customer Group for each customer.

Master Data

Before any planning is done, you'll need to setup your master data. For Sales Planning, there are four pieces of master data you'll need.

• Items

• Customer Groups

• Sales Planning Parameters

• Sales Supply Map - note: only needed if you're using the Supply Planning module.

Transactional Data

History

After you have your master data set up, you'll need to provide your historical sales. The more history you have, the better. It is recommended that you aggregate your sales by months. This is probably the most common and practical time buckets to use. Click here to go to the history table and load your history.

Sales Plan Workbench

The Sales Plan Workbench is where the planner calculates the forecast and makes updates to either the history or forecast.

Workbench screenshot

Controls

• Item selector - choose the item to plan

• Customer Group - choose which customer group you

• Calculate Sales Plan - kicks off the forecasting algorithm

• Forecast Parameters - quick access to key forecasting parameters

  • Item - reference of which item is being planned

  • Description - description of the item

  • Customer Group - customer group being planned

  • UOM - unit of measure for the item being planned

  • Forecast Periods - how many time buckets in the future will be forecasted

  • History Start - when the forecasting algorithm starts looking at history to generate a forecast

  • History End - when the forecasting algorithm stops reviewing the history to generate the forecast