The forecast for a packaging account can be predicted from the demand of the past. For accounts with exchange-partner type 'vendor' the deliveries from the vendor (positive account postings) are considered as relevant for demand-prediction, while for accounts with exchange-partner type 'customer' only the deliveries to the customer (negative account postings) are considered. This consumption can either be calculated automatically by RPM from the existing postings or can be uploaded into RPM via Excel-upload ‚Historical Data'.
The forecast is started via the job ‚Forecast Returnable Packaging Materials'. The job calculates the forecast demand based on the past consumption using the AI-algorhythm AUTOARIMA to detect weekly pattern or trends. Together with the information about existing replenishment-elements, stock-levels, lot-sizes and reorder-points, the job will then create a daily replenishment-proposal which will overwrite the old proposed replenishment quantities. The packagig manager can now check the result, make changes or trigger the replenishment.
Note
As multiple partners might have to receive the same packaging-material there might be situations where stock-levels at the plant, defined safety-stock, are too low to deliver all desired packaging-material. In this shortage situations no proposed replenishment is being created by the planning-function and an error is raised.
Manage Planning and Forecasting Attributes
The Configuration Expert can do the following customizing for the planning:
- Historical data: time in months in the past that are considered for generating the forecast
- Forecast horizon: time in months that the forecast is predicted in the future
- Purchase order horizon / sales order horizon: time in days in the future for which replenishment is created automatically via job 'Create Replenishment' if automatic replenishment is defined in the planning-relevance.
- Forecast accuracy metrics: mapping of planning-accuracy metric from the AUTOARIMA-forecasting model to 'high'/'moderate'/'low', which is displayed in the application.
External Demand Forecast
The consumption-based forecast from RPM can be replaced by data from external applications that can calculate packaging-demand from delivery-schedules for production materials and their corresponding packing-instructions, as the Automotive Consulting Solution ‚Packing Demand'. As the result of such demand-based solutions can be better than data from previous postings RPM provides an Odata API to transfer the data to RPM. The planning-type for accounts planned externally has to be defined as ‚External Demand Forecast'.
