AIM Production Planning Guide
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Contents:
- AIM Production Planning
- Forecasting Demand
- Configure a stock holding and replenishment strategy
- Review future stock on hand
- Calculating production demand
- Create a production plan (assembled products)
- Create a replenishment plan (non-assembled products)
- Navigating to components
- Reviewing component demand
- Product Forecast Table
AIM Production Planning
Using AIM, you are able to set a forecast for demand on an assembled product. By enabling production demand, the replenishments of the assembled items will become points of demand on components. The date and quantity of this demand is calculated based on your Bill of Materials in Unleashed. Once you have submitted a forecast with component demand enabled, you will be able to download a production plan CSV file. This will show you all the expected replenishments that are required in addition to what is currently booked into Unleashed as open transactions. From these suggestions you can choose to book in additional replenishments for a period of time. For example, you may produce a 12 month forecast every week and book in replenishments for the following 4 weeks based on the current calculated stock movement and forecast demand.
Let’s take a look at how to configure a production plan using AIM:
Forecasting Demand
Open a forecast of your assembled product. To open a forecast, use the search box in the AIM insights dashboard to search.
Ensure you have the right warehouse selected in the header and set the forecast demand per month by dragging the blue dots up and down in the Demand Forecast Analysis chart. You can open this by clicking ‘Demand’ in the chart toggle selector. You are only able to set forecast demand for future and current months. The past months' forecast will be read-only and can be compared to the actual demand achieved.
Configure a stock holding and replenishment strategy
Set a strategy for stock holding for your assembled item using the right hand strategy panel.
The system will calculate replenishments when it calculates that the SOH forecast on a given day is not sufficient for the demand of the following days selected as your ‘min days of stock.’ The ‘max days of stock’ will determine the size of your replenishment.
Replenishments can be triggered by either a set interval or whenever the stock on hand is insufficient for the following ‘min days of stock.’ Chose an option that matches your timing and availability, such as if you plan to replenish each month at the start of the month, then select the interval option and a start date for the first replenishment to begin from.
Review future stock on hand
Select ‘Supply’ in the chart toggle selector to see how your future stock on hand and replenishments flow over time. By default the chart will display the replenishment (placed) date which is calculated in the UI as the replenishment arrival date minus the lead days. This isn’t relevant for products that are supplied by assemblies if the production duration depends on the size of the job. For example, if the lead days is set to 7 days, but an assembly is large and requires 14 days, then the plotting of the replenishment (placed) date on this chart can be disregarding. You may wish to set the lead days to 0 for assembled items and use the export of the replenishment plan instead.
Calculating production demand
Once you have set a forecast and stock holding strategy, you can set AIM to calculate demand on components based on the replenishments in this forecast.
In the right hand panel, enable ‘Create Component Demand’ and set a source warehouse for where the production takes place.
At the bottom of the right-hand strategy panel, use the submit button to complete your forecast and begin the calculation process for component demand through all the levels of your forecast products' bill of materials.
You will see a blue notification box appear in the Plan Production setting panel on the right. This will indicate that the server is working. When it disappears, the process is complete. You can safely navigate away while the process is working, as it takes place on the AIM servers.
Create a production plan (assembled products)
Once the calculation is complete and the ‘Calculating component demand’ notification has disappeared, the ‘Export production plan’ link will become active. This will list all of the additionally required replenishments of each production within the bill of material to meet all the demand placed upon them.
Sort this spread sheet by suggested creation date to see which replenishments need to be booked in next and create open transactions in Unleashed to your liking.
These new open transactions will be loaded into AIM in the next update cycle, which is approximately hourly.
Create a replenishment plan (non-assembled products)
If your product that you are forecasting is not assembled and you want to product a replenishment plan, you can select the Supply chart to display the future stock on hand and then select the ‘export’ button next to the chart selector and export to CSV. Filtering out any day that has a 0 for the suggested replenishment quantity will give you a concise list of replenishments.
Navigating to components
On the left hand panel, the production section will display navigation links to other products within the bill of materials of the open product.
If the forecast you have open is an assembled item, you will have a ‘Components’ section, while a component product will have an ‘Assemblies’ section. A product that is both assembled and a component will have both. The list of details will show the components that are under or the assembled items that are above the current product respectively. Clicking a product here will switch the forecast to that product, so you can navigate up and down the BOM tree inside the Product Forecast interface.
You also have the option to enable or disable a ‘flattened BOM’ view. If enabled, then you will see all components or assembled items across all levels. If disabled, then you will only see a single level at a time. Below this, there is a date range selector that filters the demand calculation on the components. If you are planning replenishments for a window in time, set the filter here to see how much of a product you will need. The demand calculation will display the ‘required stock,’ which is the additional amount of stock the forecast is estimating will be needed in addition to any open transactions that are created.
Once again, if you edit the forecast, the demand calculations in this panel will become n/a. You’ll need to submit your forecast to trigger a recalculation of the component demand, or close without saving changes and reload your forecast.
Reviewing component demand
Opening the forecast of a component will display a few noticeable differences. the first being that the production demand is displayed per month in the Demand Forecast Analysis chart, and a notification is displayed in the Forecast Demand section of the strategy panel, indicating that demand is included from related assembled items.
Also, the future stock on hand chart will show negative bars indicating the date and quantity of production demand drawing down stock of this product:
If you wish, you can set a strategy for each component and submit in order to trigger a recalculation of the production plan, as outlined above.
Product Forecast Table
Details are summed up per month is the table, accessed from the chart selector:
Demand
Actual (Allocated): For months in the past, or current month, then the actual demand that has occurred is displayed. Allocated demand is the quantity that is added a transaction that will create demand as soon as it is completed. For example, you may have a pending sales order with a due date to ship in a few months’ time. The allocated stock quantity will show under that month as an allocated quantity. For the current month we are in, it is possible to have both actual and allocated stock, so the two numbers are displayed with actual and (allocated) in brackets.
Assembly Demand
Production Demand (not pictured): Only shown if the forecast you are viewing is for a component product. Production demand is the quantity that is forecast to drawn down in stock for that month.
Forecast: This is your forecast per month. Enter your cursor into the first month and type the quantity you think will be sold/used. Hit enter to move to the next month and repeat. When you are done, click out of the forecast entry box and the forecast will be calculated. This is done once at the end of data entry to improve the user experience and reduce lag due to calculations as you type.
Linear: Where the linear trend line derived from the actual performance of the product in the past intersects with the future month. The linear trend line will be a straight line on the forecast demand chart, and it will change depending on the amount of actual demand in the past and the length of history you select in the header of the forecast.
Seasonal: As above. Indicates the quantity forecast of the seasonal trend line at each month. In the forecast demand chart, the seasonal trend line will deviate from the linear trend by factoring in how the difference that same month in past years was compared to the linear trend. So if every August your actual performance for August is one third lower than the linear trend, then you’ll notice that the forecast for next August will also be a third lower than the linear trend. Even if the forecast linear trend is going up, then you’ll see August has a dip to it still. This will recreate a seasonal adjustment of some months being higher or lower due to seasonality. If you find the seasonal trend useful, you’ll want to use a longer history range, such as 18-36 months instead of just 12 months to consider more data.
Note: For our new juice product pictured above, we have no history as this is a new product. Therefore, we have no linear or seasonal trend line to help us set our forecast. If your product does, then you can use the drop down ‘Fill forecast’ option to set your forecast to one of these trend lines to help you get started with a forecast.
Supply
Open (incoming): The open supply row will indicate how much stock is coming in from open transactions, such as assemblies or purchase orders. The quantity will appear in the month set by the required date or expected delivery date.
Required: The required stock row shows the quantity of replenishments that the forecast is generating each month. This indicates how much I will need to replenish if my forecast demand occurs.