Overview of Forecasting
You can estimate future demand for items using any combination of historical, statistical, and intuitive forecasting techniques. You can create multiple forecasts and group complimenting forecasts into forecast sets.
Forecasts are consumed each time your customers place sales order demand for a forecasted product. You can load forecasts, together with sales orders, into master demand and production schedules, and use the master schedules to drive material requirements planning.
Forecast sets consist of one or more forecasts. Sets group complimenting forecasts into a meaningful whole. For example, a forecast set could contain separate forecasts by region.
Each forecast inherits the forecast level, consumption options, and other defaults defined for the set. You can override these defaults for each forecast in a set.
You can forecast with daily buckets in the short term, weekly buckets in the midterm, and periodic buckets in the longer term.
You can define a forecast for a particular item by entering a single date and quantity. You can also specify a start and end date, and a quantity.
You can include planning bills and models in forecasts. You can explode forecasts for planning items and models when loading one forecast into another, or when loading a forecast into a master schedule.
You can associate alternate bills of material to multiple forecasts for the same item, exploding different components, usages, and planning percentages.
You can manually or automatically consume forecasted demand with sales order (actual) demand.
You can define demand classes that represent groupings of similar customers or order types. This allows you to consume forecasts by sales orders of a specific demand class, for example.
You can consume forecasts at four different forecast levels: item, customer, bill-to address, or ship-to address forecast level. This allows you to consume forecasts by sales orders for a specific customer, for example.
To help manage and consolidate your forecast information, you can create new forecasts from existing forecasts or forecast sets. You can copy forecasts from your own organization or from any other organization.
You can use modification factors and/or carry forward days to modify existing forecasts. This allows you to quickly generate forecasts, for simulation purposes, for the same collection of items using modified forecast dates and quantities.
You can define item forecast rules in Oracle Inventory to establish the forecast method, bucket type, and sources of demand that are considered when compiling a statistical or focus forecast.
You can create forecasts by applying statistical and focus forecasting techniques that use historical (transaction) information.
With the Open Forecast Interface you can import forecast information generated by other systems. Oracle Master Scheduling/MRP and Oracle Supply Chain Planning validates the imported information before loading it.
Load Forecasts into the Master Schedule
You can use forecasts or forecast sets to generate master demand or master production schedules.
Review
You can review all aspects of your forecasts using on-line inquiries and reports. This information can be viewed by forecast set or individual forecast.
You can delete forecast and forecast sets. Before you can delete forecast sets, you must delete all forecasts contained within the set.
Attention: Deleting removes the forecasts, forecast sets, and all related information from the database. You cannot view or report on forecasts and forecast sets once you delete them.
Project and Seiban References
If you are working in a project-based or Seiban environment, you can include project/Seiban and task references to your forecast entries if organizational parameters allow. These references will accompany forecast copies, loads, merges, and explosion. See: Defining a Forecast.
See Also
Overview of Two-Level Master Scheduling
Overview of Master Scheduling
Production Forecast Establishment
Forecast Control
How Forecasted Discrete Items Appear in the Master Schedule
How Forecasted Repetitive Items Appear in the Master Schedule
