Demand Planning

Demand Planning is a brand new feature in Pulse to help with store ordering. It was designed specifically based on feedback from our customers, and could be a real game changer for you and your store.

Demand Planning can help you with forecasting what you need to order in your store, slashing the time you spend on planning orders from your different suppliers each week. Pulse can help you gauge optimal order quantities for a group of products or an entire category by running analysis on your sales.

A Demand Plan will calculate your optimum order quantities based on a number of parameters, which are customisable by you.

You'll find the Demand Planning feature in the left sidebar.

Demand plan settings

To set up a Demand Plan, give your plan a name and input the name of the supplier you'll be ordering from. You can edit a number of settings for the demand plan to ensure Pulse's calculations are as accurate as possible for your store's needs. You can also set it so that an order is created automatically.

• Safety Stock -  How much stock you would like to keep in reserve
• Shelf Life days - How long the average shelf life is for the products in the plan
• Use Stock position - Do you want the plan to consider the stock position for the product when calculating an order Qty
• Lead in days to use -  How many days sales leading into the plan do you want to use?
• Use last year in calculation - Do you want use sales for the same period last year in the order calculation
• Adjust Order for waste - If there is high waste for the products, should we take this into account when recommending an order
• Adjust Order for no waste - If there is low waste for the products, should we take this into account when recommending an order
• Adjust Order for overrides - If the product is being Overridden/marked down, should we take this into account when ordering the product
• Auto create - Enables the auto create section
• Auto create daily - Select if you want this plan to be created daily
• Auto create weekly - Select if you want the plan to create weekly
• Auto create DOW - Select the day of the week you want the plan to be created for
• Auto create before demand start - How many days before the order should the plan be created/visible to you?
• Demand day start - What day of the week should this demand plan start on?
• Auto create duration - How many days does the order cover

Products

The first thing a demand plan needs is products.

When you click the "Add Products" button, you will be presented with the ability to search by product.

You will have the ability to edit specific product detail, such as the Minimum Order Qty (MOQ). This will help ensure accurate order quantities.

You can also specify the ordering unit of measure. For example, if you can only order in Cases, you can enter that information as the UOM, as well as how many products are in a case (in the "Conversion to Order UOM" field). This saves you the hassle of trying to work this out every time you want to create an order!

If you press the edit button and you will have the option to change the fields.

Press confirm or cancel once completed.

Orders

Once the plan has been configured and products have been added, you just need to create an order and provide dates that the order is for.

This can be done by navigating to the Orders tab and pressing Add Order.

You will be asked to input the dates that the order covers.

Once you have saved your dates, the system will generate an order. Once an order has been generated, order details are not editable.

On the order page, you see the recommended "Order Qty" for each product.

Predicted sales vs actual sales

Every day the predicted sales vs actual sales are updated, allowing you to track if your order is in line with Pulse's predictions. In this example below, sales are 3% lower than predicted sales, and the there is no variance between predicted and actual waste.

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Managing Related Demand plans

You can group your demand plans so that the same products can be used in multiple plans.

For example, you can create a plan, add 20 products, and update the product order details. That Plan might be called Weekly Bakes.

Then when you create another plan, eg. Monday's Bakes, you can add it the Weekly Bakes group, and the products will be the same as the "Weekly Bakes" plan.

Auto create orders

If order a group of products daily or weekly, you can set it so the order forecast is generated automatically.

You can tick the frequency of the auto creation, and specify when you want the plan to generate.

The order will generate each day based on the parameters provided, and will appear in your Orders tab.

Confidence Factor

Nothing is certain, and sometimes if products sales do not follow a pattern, then we may be less confident in our prediction. So with every prediction we give a confidence factor, which in turn gives you confidence in what you should be ordering.

Our Confidence Factor is based on the following:

• • Length of demand (the longer the better)
    • 1 day = 2 %
    • 2-4 days = 4 %
    • 5-7 days = 6 %
    • 8-14 days = 8 %
    • > 14 days = 10 %
      
      
  • Regularity of the sales of the product over last month
    • >= 2 per day = 40 %
    • >= 1 and < 2 = 35 %
    • 0.75 - 1 = 25 %
    • 0.50 - 0.75 = 20 %
    • 0.25 - 0.5 = 15 %
    •  0.10 - 0.25 = 18 %
    • Otherwise 5%
      
      
  • Based on variation of last month to last week
    • <= 10 % = 30 %
    • Between 10 and 30 = 20 %
    • > 30 % then 10 %
      
      
  • If sales exist in last 7 days
    • + 10 %
      
      
  • If linked to a label
    • + 5%
      
      
  • if present and sold in store over a year
    • + 5%