Overview of Demand Classes
Demand classes allow you to segregate scheduled demand and production into groups, allowing you to track and consume those groups independently. A demand class may represent a particular grouping of customers, such as governmental and commercial customers, or it may represent sales channels or regions. Demand classes may also represent different sources of demand, such as retail, mail order, and wholesale.
Defining Demand Classes
You can optionally define demand classes to group similar customers or sales orders. You can use demand classes as a means of forecasting different sources of demand separately.
You can associate a demand class to a customer ship to address in Oracle Receivables and to an order type in Oracle Order Entry. Oracle Order Entry automatically assigns a demand class to a sales order line using either the demand class associated to the customer ship to address or the order type.
You can assign a default demand class to your organization. Oracle Master Scheduling/MRP and Supply Chain Planning uses this demand class during forecast consumption, and shipment and production relief.
Forecasting by Demand Class
You can optionally associate a demand class to a forecast when you define the forecast name. When you place sales order demand, the forecast consumption process consumes the forecast with the same demand class. If the forecast consumption process does not find a forecast, it consumes entries that have no demand class. If you place sales order demand that does not have an associated demand class, the forecast consumption process attempts to consume forecast entries associated with the organizational default demand class first, and then consume entries that have no demand class defined.
Master Scheduling by Demand Class
You can optionally associate a demand class to a master demand schedule or master production schedule when you define the master schedule name. When you ship a sales order or create a discrete job, that sales order or discrete job consumes the master schedules that are associated with the demand class of the sales order or discrete job. After consuming master schedules with the same demand class as the sales order or discrete job, Oracle Master Scheduling/MRP and Supply Chain Planning consumes master schedules with no demand class.
You can load a subset of the sales orders into your master schedule for a specific demand class.
You can limit the netting of discrete jobs, repetitive schedules, reservations, and subinventories when planning a master production schedule. If you are planning a master production schedule that has an associated demand class, it only nets discrete jobs and repetitive schedules that have the same demand class. You can segregate your subinventories and reserved inventory by demand class and selectively net them when launching the planning process.
