Plan Approval, Plan Attributes, and Plan Status
Use Oracle Demand Management to facilitate forecast reconciliation and agreement of cross-functional forecasts. With forecast reconciliation, you can view a forecast captured from cross-functional teams at both aggregate and detailed levels.
Forecast reconciliation helps you do the following:
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Compare forecast at the plan level, show the variance over a period of time, or across different product segments.
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Use built-in exceptions, such as deviation between sales and final shipments forecast to reconcile the sales forecast with your estimates.
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Use user-defined exceptions and calculations to find more specific issues that fit your evaluation criteria.
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Use conditional formatting to identify which specific weeks or items have a problem at a glance.
The forecast review and approval process describes a flow where you can approve the forecast of a plan after you generate statistical forecast. You review and modify forecast as needed. After you validate the forecast, you can approve the forecast for the plan.
The approve action copies the forecast data to the designated approved measure and changes the plan status to approved.
Examples:
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In case of the Bookings Forecast, the approve process copies the data from the Final Bookings Forecast measure to the Approved Final Bookings Forecast measure.
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In case of the Shipments Forecast, the approve process copies the data from the Final Shipments Forecast measure to the Approved Final Shipments Forecast measure.
The approve action updates three approval-related plan attributes:
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The Approval Status attribute is gets updated to Approved.
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The Last Approved By attribute gets updated with the user name.
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The Last Approved Date attribute gets updated with the approve plan process date and time.
You can review the plan attributes from the Manage Plans page.
To reset the approval status of a plan: Navigate to the plan's Actions menu, and select Reset Approval Status. This resets the Approval Status plan attribute.