Use Demand Plan Measures for Consensus Forecasting

Instead of generating a statistical forecast in your sales and operations plan, use a forecast measure in Oracle Demand Management Cloud as the baseline for consensus forecasting in Sales and Operations Planning.

After you develop a consensus demand forecast in your sales and operations planning cycle, run your sales and operations plan and then review and adjust the consensus forecast.

You can use a demand forecast measure as an input for aggregate supply planning. For example, your unconstrained demand forecast might be calculated in a user-defined measure in your demand plan. You can run the sales and operations plan with this demand forecast and then review the plan output. If you need to override this baseline forecast, then you can edit the Adjusted Consensus Forecast measure and run the plan again to simulate the supply impact due to this change in demand.

By loading a forecast measure from a Demand Management plan as the baseline of your consensus forecast, the planning process recognizes that statistical demand forecasts are generated in your demand plan and not your sales and operations plan. For example, the demand plan measure includes data for new product forecasts and modeled events. In this case, you can't associate a forecasting profile with a sales and operations plan when loading a demand measure to the Shipments Forecast.

Configure the Demand Plan Measure

Navigate to the Plan Options page, Demand tab to configure the demand plan measure for your sales and operations plan.

• Load measure data from demand plan to target measure: Select the check box to load a forecast measure from a Demand Management plan to the Shipments Forecast measure in a sales and operations plan.

  When selected, all associated forecast profiles are removed from your sales and operations plan.

• From Plan: Select the Demand Management plan to use as the source of the forecast measure to load measure data into a sales and operations plan.

  The field displays any demand plan that uses a hybrid time hierarchy if the planning calendar of your sales and operations plan is one of the calendars that was used in the creation of the hybrid time hierarchy. The planning calendar and planning time level of the sales and operations plan determine the level at which measure data is copied.

  For example, if you copy measure data from a demand plan for which the planning calendar is a Gregorian hybrid hierarchy to a sales and operations plan that's defined at the Gregorian month, measure data gets copied at the Gregorian month level.

• Demand Measure: Select a forecast measure to load from a Demand Management plan.

  Note: If the forecast measure to load from the demand plan is user-defined then you must ensure that the measure is added to the End Item Demand measure group. This step adds the measure to the list that appears in the Demand Measure field.