Forecast Confidence Index

With this feature you can evaluate forecast values generated based on a forecast confidence index (FCI). The FCI is an indicator of statistical confidence in a particular unit forecast. The FCI is always calculated for a specific product at a specific location, and it is based on the amount of historical information provided to forecast the demand for this product.

Benefits:

FCI ranges for quickly evaluating forecasts: You can configure what constitutes a high, medium, or low FCI for your business. Based on your settings, the system not only generates the FCI value for a particular forecast but also qualifies this value as high, medium, or low.
FCI reason codes for analyzing low FCIs: The system also estimates which of the demand influencing factors (DIFs) considered for a particular forecast is most determinant in causing a low FCI value. This allows you to take corrective measures, for example, by changing the terms of a planned offer.

This feature can be used when creating offers with SAP Promotion Management for Retail, one of the consuming applications of Demand Data Foundation (DDF) with Unified Demand Forecast (UDF).

Technical Details

Technical Name of Product Feature	FORECAST CONFIDENCE INDEX
Product Feature Is	New
Country Dependency	Valid for all countries
Software Component Version	RTLDDF 200
Application Component	CA-DDF-RT
Available as of	Demand Data Foundation 2.0

Additional Details

The FCI value range is 0 to 1:

0: High uncertainty in the forecast value based on the historical input data
1: High confidence in the forecast value based on the historical input data

Reasons for low FCI values include the following:

002: Limited sales history
003: No or limited sales history for offer combination
005: High variability of sales history volume
010: Net price beyond confident historical range of average
021: Offer type has limited sales history

Effects on Existing Data

The messages for low FCI reasons are maintained in the following message classes:

/DMF/UDF_FC_INFO.
/DMF/PRM_FCST_MSG_HL

You can also use the FCI when calculating offer financials. For more information, see the following:

Business functions Decompression of Offer Financials Data and Optimizations for Offer Financials
View for specifying parameters for offer financials (/DMF/V_FIN_CUST)

Effects on Customizing

You can configure the FCI ranges Low, Medium, and High in Customizing under Start of the navigation path Cross-Application Components Next navigation step Demand Data Foundation Modeling and Forecasting Define Categories for Forecast Confidence Index End of the navigation path . For more information, see the Customizing activity documentation in your system (transaction SPRO).