Better decision-making and increased profits are must easier when you are given the ability to forecast accurately. MaxQ’s Demand Planning module is designed specifically to assist you in your sales and inventory planning efforts by creating accurate forecasts, using your sales history from Microsoft Dynamics SL (or any other source), in combination with its powerful statistical forecasting models.
The Demand Planning Module is capable of being integrated with Forecast Pro.
Multi-level Forecasting Models
In an effort to satisfy all mainstream business forecasting requirements, our demand planning module can automatically select forecasting models from the following five classes or include a user-defined forecasting model:
Moving Average Models
For very short or extremely volatile data, Forecast Pro includes moving average models.
Box-Jenkins
For stable data sets, Forecast Pro supports a multiplicative seasonal Box-Jenkins model. The model can be built automatically or interactively, using a full range of screen-oriented diagnostics.
Low Volume Models
Croston’s Intermittent Demand model and discrete data models are provided to accommodate low volume and “sparse” data (i.e. where the demand is often zero).
Curve Fitting Models
Provides a quick and easy way to identify the general form of the curve (i.e. straight line, quadratic, exponential, and s-curve).
Exponential Smoothing
12 different Holt-Winters Exponential Smoothing Models accommodate various data characteristics, ideal when there are no leading indicators or if the data is too short or volatile for Box-Jenkins. You can select the model and set the parameters yourself or let Forecast Pro do it automatically.
Features for Maximum Performance
Predict
Uses sales history and statistical techniques to predict future usage.
Group
User defined planning groups on any level or combination of levels, such as product and customer class, or territory.
Customer Entry
Manually enter partial customers while allowing past usage (excluding effects of manual entries) for the remaining to drive statistical calculations. Results in a complete forecast that includes both groups.
Maintenance
Forecast group entry uses both bottom up or top down methods of maintenance.
Allowances
Make allowances for special events like promotion, sales, shutdown, seasons, or other occurrences.
Integrate
Integrates with MaxQ Supply Chain Planning to automatically plan the inventory needs of the forecast.
Unlimited Forecasts
Capacity to maintain an unlimited number of forecast versions.
