I want to start using forecasting and MRP/Order suggestions but we are a distribution company and its not clear to me how well this should work for us
I want to enter forecasts for the next 12 months. I plan to enter the months forecast sales for day 1 of that month however sales will occur through the month. Is that ok?
Are actual sales deducted or added to forecast> For example I forecast sales of 2000 for March. As I get nearer the time I start taking forward orders for March. Lets say thats 600 confirmed orders. Will the system think I expect to sell 2600 or will it stay at 2000 (with that no being composed of a 1400 forecast and 600 sales)
Our product comes from China so if we have a 60 day manufacturing lead time and a 30 day shipping time should I be setting LT at 90 or is there a place to put the two components?
Tme phase looks useful but is there no way to see it for all products and show me those items with predicted stock outs?
It can be done in Epicor but my personal opinion is that you don’t want to. I would take a look at PlanningEdge.
I say this because, just with forecasting, you run into all kinds of problems like, forecast bias, exceptional and irregular demand, seasonality, and incomplete history. This means you are going to be continuously building more and more tools to model the data and work around these problems. With a third party solution this has already been done.
For example, here is their Lead Time which takes Original Expected Dock, Expected Dock, Planned Dock, and Actual Dock dates (also Release, Ship, Receipt, and Putaway Lead Times)
In epicor you have your forecast window which is defined in Company Configuration -> Production MRP.
This defines the window that forecast is consumed against. For example, you forecast every 30 days, with a days before of 0 and a days after of 30, sales orders in those 30 days are consumed against this forecast. Thus, if you forecast 50 and sell 20, the unconsumed forecast is 30.
You do need to be careful with MRP and forecast as it schedules all the forecast demand on a single day, thus you can get spikes in your production. If you want to get a more regular demand, it may be a good idea to break down the forecast into smaller smaller forecast periods (e.g. 7 days).
Sorry - one other thing, you will need to decide whether you want the unconsumed forecast to remain after a forecast period ends. If you want to get rid of, I have found the best way is to deactivate forecasts at the end of the period defined by the forecast window.