Data Object Definition
The Sales Forecast or Demand Forecast is a prediction of future sales for a given customer and product. It plays an important role in both Sales and Supply Chain for planning and decision-making.
Deployment Status
This data is not yet available in the Data Ocean, but is being worked on to be available by the end of Q3 2023.
Data Model
Additional Info & Comments
- The Sales Forecast is managed in either Dynasis or Picasso, depending on the GBU.
- Different GBUs manage the sales forecast at different levels. For some GBU's the physical location of the demand is important for production planning so the forecast needs to be managed at shipto level. For others, the physical location is less critical and the forecast can be managed at soldto level, giving the customer flexibility in the shipto location. Similarly, the specific packaging format is less relevant in some GBU's and the demand forecast can be managed at a higher level in the product hierarchy, typically at Product level rather than Material level (so without specifying packaging format).
- Some GBU's maintain both an unconstrained forecast and a constrained forecast. The difference between the two is that the unconstrained forecast reflects the total demand the customer would have if Solvay had capacity available to meet all the customer's needs, while the constrained forecast reflects only the available capacity that has been allocated to the customer. The sales teams are typically responsible for providing an unconstrained forecast, while the supply chain and operations team perform the allocation and constraining to ensure that committed volumes do not exceed available capacity.
Sales forecast in the data lake:
- In the data lake the sales forecast are retrieved from BW query "Sales Forecast Revenue QV_BW_QRY_CPCOPC07_0001". The query will be refreshed twice a day from BW to data lake. Each refresh triggers the recalculation of the measures defined in the data lake including the calculation of the price forecast.
- Important measures available in the data lake that is important in the context of pricing includes:
- Forecast volume: This is the forecast sale quantity. It is directly retrieved from Forecast query.
- Forecast price: This is the unit price forecast. (Calculation: Forecast price calculation)
- Forecast sales: This is the forecast sale calculated by multiplying the forecast volume with forecast price. (Important Note: there is a measure in BW represents forecast sales but it has NOT been used in the context of pricing)