Does anyone have experience with forecasting stock demands for their finished goods? Our end goal is to be able to link a sales order to a stock demand without a forecast window.
For example, if there is a sales order entered for a finished good on 12/16, but there was already a stock demand for that for say 1/16 and your cutoff was 15 days forward/backward, we want that sales order to take up that stock demand regardless rather than duplicating the builds.
We’ve tried different processes to get this to work, but can’t seem to get there. Our current state: We are currently trying a new method of forecasting by creating firm, unreleased jobs, so we can simply link a sales order to the job when a sales order comes through and release it. The problem with this is, if there is an engineering revision, or product change to the Bill of Materials, the firm job has to be deleted and recreated to pull in the new data, so it becomes a pain for our production scheduler to stay on top of. Also, our buyers are seeing real demand for goods further out rather than the unfirm demands.
What are others doing? Has anyone ran into similar issues?
Any help is greatly appreciated!