The Set Demand panel lets you configure options relating to your forecast demand. 

Upon opening a forecast that does not have any demand set for a month, you'll be greeted with a warning: 'Some months missing forecast demand.'

You can enter demand for each month by either dragging the points of the forecast in the Demand chart, or typing in your forecast in the Forecast Table below the chart. 

Once you have entered a demand figure for each month of the forecast, you'll see a tick appear. It's acceptable to enter a 0 for demand in a month. This is a valid forecast valid. 

Select the size of your forecast

You can choose to forecast 6, 12 or 18 months ahead. By default a forecast will be for the next 12 months. 

Auto fill forecast using trends

In order to save time setting the forecast, you may opt to set the forecast to match one of the system generated forecasts, linear trend, seasonal trend, or Year-on-year growth. 

If you select Year-on-year growth, you will be able to enter the percentage growth you want to forecast. This will set the forecast to the actuals of last year plus the percentage of growth. You are able to enter a negative number to forecast a reduction in demand. 

If you do not have sufficient history, the seasonal trend line and year-on-year growth options may not be available or suitable. With limited history, you may see the linear trend line increasing or decreasing unrealistically.

Enter demand manually

This button will scroll down the page to the Forecast Table. Click into the blue row 'Forecast' to start entering your forecast per month. Hit enter to move to the next cell. Once you are done, click out of the cell and the forecast will update based on your entered values. 

Configure history (optional)

We have a couple of extra options that you may find useful.

The first is the ability to change the size of the history of the product. By default, the forecast will load the history size depending on how much actual demand history exists. However, if you only want to consider more recent history, you may opt to shorten this time period. You will see the trend lines recalculate based on the selected history size. 

You also have the option to 'Link to sales/demand locations' with a list of warehouses to choose from. By default, each product / warehouse will have the actual demand history based on the demand that was created in that warehouse. The trend lines are also calculated based on this warehouse. However, in order to cater for a situation where you have a production site that transfers stock to multiple sales locations, you won't have any demand generated in the production site directly. To work around this issue, you can select the sales location warehouses, which will recalculate the actual demand history and the trend lines.