Collaborative Sales Forecasting

Use

Collaborative Sales Forecasting (CSF) is a function that allows suppliers and customers to collaborate on sales forecast data, by means of the Sales Forecast Details – Product View screen. Suppliers and customers use consensus finding to compare forecast data and come to a common agreement about the sales forecast for a particular product in a specific time period.

Note Note

CSF uses baseline data only to calculate the consensus forecast.

End of the note.

There are two process variants available: a customer-led variant based on daily forecast data, and a supplier-led variant based on weekly forecast data. In both processes, the supplier bears the overall responsibility for replenishment, although the customer is still involved and can also control consensus finding.

Suppliers and customers can compare both promotion and baseline sales forecast data received from Statistical Forecasting, Promotion Planning and XML messages containing sales forecast data. SAP Supply Network Collaboration calculates the absolute differences and percentage differences between supplier and customer data and proposes a final consensus sales forecast. Suppliers can manually change the system proposal if the data does not correspond to expected or acceptable values. Suppliers can send outbound XML messages to customers to share the results of the consensus finding, or release final consensus forecast data to Short-Term Forecasting before the data is released to Replenishment Planning.

For more information about supplier-led and customer-led scenarios, see Process Flow in Collaborative Sales Forecasting .

Prerequisites

For information about setting up Collaborative Sales Forecasting, see Settings in Collaborative Sales Forecasting .

Features

Alert and Color Profiles for Collaborative Sales Forecasting

You can define alert profiles for Collaborative Sales Forecasting. Alert profiles define the alert levels the system issues for defined situations. You can define alerts as information, warning, or errors. You can choose to switch alerting for CSF on or off for all situations or only for a specific situation.

You can define color profiles for CSF. Color profiles define the colors displayed in the time bucket cells of the relevant key figures on the Sales Forecast Details – Product View and Sales Forecast Overview screens.

For more information about configuring alert and color profiles, see Settings in Collaborative Sales Forecasting .

Reports for Collaborative Sales Forecasting
Sending XML messages: ProductForecastNotifications and ProductForecastRevisionNotifications

You can use the report Send ProductForecastNotifications and ProductForecastRevisionNotifications (/SCA/FCST_OUT) to send outbound XML messages containing original or calculated consensus forecast data.

This report was previously only available for ProductForecastNotifications. The report is available on the SAP Easy Access screen, by choosing Start of the navigation path Supply Network Collaboration Next navigation step Tools Next navigation step Send XML Messages for Time Series. End of the navigation path

For more information about XML messages, see XML Messages in Collaborative Sales Forecasting .

Demand Release

You use the Release Demand (/SCA/DEMAND_RELEASE) report to release demand from Collaborative Sales Forecasting to Short-Term Forecasting.

For more information about releasing demands, see Demand Release .