Demand planning

Ensure you've always got the right stock amount on hand and alleviate concerns about order delays, dissatisfied customers, high holding costs, or wasted stock.

User permissions: Budgets & Forecasts and Manage Budgets & Forecasts

While most of the information in this user documentation is focused on sales and financial use cases, the Budgets & Forecasts module can also be used with purchasing and inventory databases to help you make decisions around demand. This includes decisions on the future purchases you need to make to ensure you can meet customer demand and avoid overholding stock.

Watch these videos:

• Phocas Demo: Demand planning - overview of how you can use Budgets & Forecasts to create a demand plan that integrates your sales forecasts and purchasing data

• PUG Training: Demand planning - how to make the most of your sales and purchasing data to plan future purchases and stock holdings. The key steps in the video are:

  • Create the budget: It all starts with an operational budget that's based on the database containing your purchasing and stock data. If that database also includes sales data that is helpful, but you can connect to your Sales database later. The budget setup includes additional measures to calculate quantities including the opening stock, sales, purchases and closing stock.

  • Add a Lookup tab in which to introduce the supplier price list.

  • Update the budget setup by adding a Lookup measure, switching the header input line to a calculation, and adding more measures, such as reorder quantity.