Forecasting for Future Bills of Distribution (BODs) 

Use

If you want to plan using new bills of distribution (BODs) from a specific point in the future, the system must consider these future BODs during forecasting. If, for example, you want to stock a product at an extra location, your BOD changes. Due to this change, the demand of this product may reduce at other locations in your BOD. This means that as of the point in time when you consider the new location product during planning, a new BOD becomes valid. You create this new BOD in the master data for bills of distribution and specify the point in time at which it becomes valid.

During leading-indicator-based forecasting the system does not consider any future BODs.

Prerequisites

If you want to consider future BODs during forecasting, you must schedule the forecast service in the Planning Service Manager (PSM) again.

For more information, see Use of the Planning Service Manager for Service Parts Planning.

Features

If you have created a new BOD on a certain date, the system calculates the demand history for both the previous and the new BOD, meaning that it creates and saves two time series. Until the point in time when the new BOD becomes valid, the system creates the forecast for the previous BOD on the basis of the demand history of the previous BOD. As of this point in time, the system creates the forecast for the new BOD based on the demand history of the new BOD. The system thereby writes the forecast in a key figure, which may lead to a kink in the forecast curve.

The following figure illustrated this process: