Problem: When planner doesn’t want to generate forecast for certain Item-Location-Customer combinations.
For example, in below scenarios customer doesn’t want to generate forecast:
- When an existing item is replaced by new item then old item shouldn’t generate forecast.
- When Business Line for any product is closed.
By default, this feature comes as out of box functionality in Demantra. PREDICTION_STATUS and DO_FORE controls whether a combination should be considered by Demantra Engine to generate forecast.
DO_FORE: Specifies whether to perform forecasting on a particular item-location combination. Do Fore Series points to do_fore column in mdp_matrix table.
Below are the list of values available in dropdown :
0—Do Not Do Forecast.
1—Do Forecast (the default).
2—Do Zero Forecast. This combination is not used in aggregation.
Standard feature available in Cloud: In order to achieve this functionality in cloud Oracle has provided a measure ‘Shipments Forecast Generate Forecast’ for inactivating ‘Shipments Forecast’. We need to update the measure value as ‘3’(Inactive) in table/view followed by plan run.
Limitations with standard feature: Below can be possible scenarios when we need alternative solution:
- When customer wants the forecast to be inactivated as soon as it is updated to 3. But in this approach we need to run plan run in order to bring this solution into effect.
- Since, this is a time independent measure and when we try to update the value to 3 in time dependent table/view then after table refresh the value doesn’t get displayed. So user gets confused whether value is updated or not or in other words, combination is active/inactive.
- Also when customer wants to have dropdown functionality to select ‘Do Forecast’ and ‘Do not Do forecast’ and wanted the solution to work with immediate effect.
Solution: In order to achieve above functionality, we need to create 2 measures:
a ) Time independent measure with list values as shown in below screenshot:
b) Time dependent measure having below expression:
if (Do Not Fcst Input=300000001769804,’Do Fcst’,
if(Do Not Fcst Input=300000001769803,’Do Not Do Fcst’, NULL))
Value of Do Not Fcst Input for ‘Do Fcst’ and ‘Do Not Do Fcst’ can be taken from ‘MSC_MEASURE_SOURCE_LISTS_TL table.
Using above measures users can select ‘Do Fcst’ and ‘Do Not Do Fcst’ in time independent measures and this can be used in ‘Final Shipments Forecast’ expression to make NULL forecast for the combination where user has selected ‘Do Not Do Fcst’.
Vikas Kumar is Techno functional consultant with experience of over 9 years working on Oracle SCM cloud and Oracle Demantra. He has been part of the various implementation and support projects.
