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Purchasing with Forecasting
Requirements Forecasting Setup Screen Example
Forecasting is predicting stock usage by any of a variety of methods: by
past or future depletions by sales or production, past usage, past orders,
or even quantities entered manually into lists.
As described previously, forecasted amounts can be the amount ordered or
they can be used to adjust the stock levels of the build-to methods.
Forecasting from Activity: One option is to forecast using past- or
future-dated activity file records. (Activity records are the detailed history
records.) After you set a range of dates, IPro adds all the appropriate activity
records together to determine the forecast amount.
This is useful if you want to forecast based on some prior time period and
a scalar. For example, let's say that business is highly seasonal and changes
greatly from month to month. You can't predict by last month, but you can
predict by the same month a year ago. Also, you need to factor in that volume
has improved by 10% overall. You can ask IPro to forecast using activity
for the same period last year, only scaled by 110%.
IPro can forecast for any date range for which there is posted activity--
even future dates. If you know future sales or orders and post them to future
dates, you can use those too.
IPro has features which allow it to handle very complicated, though not uncommon
scenarios such as this:
Let's say you are the purchasing manager of a major hotel with four restaurants,
three kitchens, six bars, two large banquet halls, eight storage areas and
a central commissary.
It is possible to automatically add up all the requisitions from all the
restaurants and kitchens, all the build-to-par amounts from the storage areas,
and all the ingredient requirements from all the special event sales and
combine them all into one master set of purchase orders or buy lists. It's
just a matter of selecting the appropriate source and target lists and setting
up the purchasing and forecasting process accordingly.
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