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AIM Product Forecast

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AIM Product Forecast is designed to help you take the guess work out of managing your stock management and production planning.

Use Product Forecast on important products that warrant careful management. The AIM Insights Dashboard has a panel that ranks your top products, so consider creating forecasts for these first.

 

In AIM Product Forecast, set expected demand per month or fill the forecast based on trends that the system calculates. Apply a stock strategy of how many days stock you want to carry at a minimum and how many days of stock you want to order. The system will then calculate your products future stock on hand and detail required replenishments. 

AIM will calculate the future stock on hand by incorporating existing transactions and forecast demand to calculate necessary upcoming replenishments. For every day of your forecast, AIM will calculate the amount of demand forecast on the following days set in your strategy with the predicted stock available on that day. If AIM calculates that you wont have enough stock to cover the strategy days-of-stock, it will size a replenishment based on the amount of demand that it requires for the following days. This system therefore calculates a dynamic, smart replenishment through the life of a product.

AIM helps you set a lead time for supplier deliveries to ensure the replenishment is created with enough time for the product to arrive before a stock out.

NOTE: If you're looking to use Forecasting for Production Planning, then note that Lead Days is not used in production plans. Instead, the production duration settings of the Bill of Material will be used by AIM to calculate the necessary assembly start date. 

We recommend that you create forecasts for products that have seasonality, or complex changes in demand, such as new products or end-of-life products, as the replenishment calculation will be very detailed to support these changes. 

AIM Forecast will set min/max stock limits in a similar way to AIM Modelling only if you are using the Manual Strategy. The stock limits are calculated on the average demand of the forecast months multiplied by the days of stock in your strategy. The Stock Days strategy uses a more advanced calculation to set the size and date of replenishments. These replenishments will appear in the forecast and the AIM replenishment tab. It is best to think of these systems as two alternatives to choose from. The min/max of Modelling and Manual Strategy Forecasts, or the Stock Days Strategy of Forecasts and the Replenishment tab details (recommended). 

 

Manual Strategy method (legacy)
Average rate of demand x Days of stock -> Min / Max Stock limits -> Stock alerts ->Reorder Report

AIM Replenishments (new)

Dynamic calculation for each day of the forecast -> Replenishment tab

Let's compare these two methods:

AIM Replenishments using Just-in-Time / Stock Days strategy. (note how the replenishments are sized to match the demand that follows)

If you would like the see the future stock on hand based on stock limits and replenishing via the Reorder Report, set your strategy days using Stock Days and then flip the strategy to Manual. The future stock on hand chart will then show you replenishments from min to max using this more basic method. Because the min and max are based on the average demand, it may fail to replenish sufficiently for peaks in demand and it may replenish at a min trigger point even if there is no subsequent demand. 

Here is the exact same forecast demand as above, but replenishing based on min/max stock alerts. This simulates what will happen if you use stock alerts / reorder report to create replenishments between min and max: 

Note that using static stock limits above has created replenishments that are roughly equal in size despite the varying demand. Stockouts occur in times of peak demand and far too much stock is held in times of low demand. Finally, the stock is replenished despite demand waning at the end-of-life of the product, which the AIM Replenishment system calculated exactly how much demand fell within the strategy and calculated the replenishment to suit. 

AIM now features a replenishment tab to provide a list of calculated replenishments. Initially, this will work with the replenishments from Production Plans which also uses the AIM Replenishment calculation process for all components through a Bill of Material. Coming soon it will list all forecast replenishments!

Welcome to Forecasting AIM! To get started, check out our guide. 

 

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