Bookshelf v7.5: About Sales Volume Planning

Companies use sales volume planning as part of their annual forecasting process based on the following data:

These five data sets make the sales volume planning process possible and provide feedback, in the form of baseline and target quantities, for current and future sales volume plans. This data may be developed internally or supplied by a third party. Refer to Table 15 for definitions and sources of these data sets.

NOTE: This chapter uses the term quantity to represent any amount in sales volume planning. You can also use a monetary amount, such as currency, in sales volume planning. However, you cannot execute sales volume planning using quantity and monetary amounts at the same time.

Companies should perform complex trending and data modification on the initial load of historical records, such as shipment history, before importing this data into Siebel base tables.

Table 15. Sales Volume Planning Data Sets
Data Set	Definition	Sources
Baseline	The amount of volume that would have been sold in the absence of a promotional event	Customer warehouse withdrawal information provided by a customer to the manufacturer or from a third-party data source Shipments to accounts information
Incremental	The amount of volume sold over and above baseline that can be attributed to a promotional event	Derived by calculating the difference between customer warehouse withdrawals, or shipments, and baseline Provided by a third-party data source Precalculated by incorporating lift matrices or using an educated estimation
Target (Also referred to as quota or objective)	The amount of volume a manufacturer expects its sales force to sell in a given period	Based on a factor or shipments, baseline, or consumption data from a prior period The factor is most often a growth or decline rate expected for the upcoming period
Shipments	The amount of product shipped to customers	Virtually always stored in, and imported from, an order processing system or customer data warehouse
Consumption	The amount of product purchased and used by consumers	Usually provided by a third-party data source May be derived by using customer warehouse withdrawals as a proxy