Use this dialog box to decide how an aggregated adjustment or the Life Cycle parameters start level and saturation, is divided down to its base flow part members. The usage of this dialog box depends on your starting point. You get a preview on the resulting adjustment when you click Generate Result in the dialog box. In the explanation below we have assumed that the target for the distribution is forecast, if you choose life cycle the dialog box works similar but then the start level and saturation fields are the target for the distribution. When using life cycle the periods is not available as a distribute by selection.
Periods is important to use when the target/source parts are likely to be different seasonal patterns.
To describe what this can be used for is best illustrated with some examples:
Example 1
Typical usage of this dialog is if you have open a new store, on this store all parts have 0 history and forecast, instead of making a manual forecast for each part in the store you can create a global forecast for the entire store, this forecast can be done in money instead of units. Instead of doing an even spread among all the parts of the aggregated quantity, you can use the distributed adjustment dialog to do the spread based on the sales of another similar store that has history. This way you are only left with the problem of forecasting the total sales of a store and use the sales spread of another store to do the spread among the parts in the new store.
Example 2
Another usage is that if you for example sell shirts that comes in 4 different sizes small, medium, large and X-large. Instead of forecasting each shirt and size combo separately, you can place a total forecast on the t-shirt (group part/phantom part) and make the size distribution based on the a other T-shirt/T-shirts sold.
Example 3
You can also use this to forecast new parts instead of using inheritance. Let's say you have 3 Stores and you are going to introduce a new part that is going to be sold in all these stores. Then you select the new part on the combined flow (the flow that consists of the sum of all 3 stores) then you set the forecast for all 3 stores combined. Then you base the spread among the 3 stores on a similar part, or a group of parts, or you can base it on the total size of the stores. This is much faster than setting up processor and other inheritance info on the part for all the 3 stores. To find the total forecast volume you can look at the total forecast for a similar product and use this as a starting point.
More complex distributions are also possible like a combination of Example 2 and 3 were you distribute based on size between different stores, so if one store has more larger customers this store will get a larger proportion of the X-large sizes.
As mentioned the starting point is essential to the function of this dialog so let's look at the different starting points.
The adjustment/settings done on a combined flow part and distributed down to the base flow parts according to a reference part or group of parts. This is the example 3 from above.
Here you stand on a specific part on a combined flow, you start with entering a forecast on the combined flow part, then you push the distributed adjustment button. Then you decide what you want to base the forecast on (forecast or history), then you set what you want to distribute by, flow is the only choice you select her, in combination with periods. If the flow have different seasonal sales in the flows ,e.g. one flow has higher sales in the summer and one has higher sales in the winter, then it is important to distribute by periods as well. If you only select flow then you will get a percentage number for each base flow in the combined flow, if you also add periods you get one percentage per period as well. So this will give one percentage per base flow and period. Once you have selected the distribute by, you can also define the source conditions.>If you leave this blank all parts will be used a reference, by selecting one or more fields you narrow the reference to those parts that matches all the criteria(s). This is done more or less like you select a part / group in the selection view (the main Demand Plan Client user interface).
Here the adjustment is done on the group level and distributed down to the base flow parts (e.g. stock keeping unit), this is the examples 1 and 2 from above. We see 2 likely scenarios here.
The first one is that you will start up a new Store/flow and you want to create a forecast for all parts in the flow this can be achieved with distributed adjustment by first entering the total forecast for all parts within the store. Note that you can enter the volume in any of the units available in Demand Planning. Then you open the Distributed Adjustment dialog, after selecting what to base the distribution on, you then select what you want to distribute by, that's Part No's in this case (We want to distribute the globally entered forecast down to the parts within the flows) you can also add periods if you want to have a unique percentage for each period in the forecast horizon (works only when you have forecast as base for the distribution). Then the final choice is to select the Source Conditions again no selection means that you use all flows to compute the reference keys. So in the Source Conditions you set the flow (if you are clever you select a flow that you believe will have a similar sales distribution), if you don't want to go with using all flows as reference.
The second likely scenario here is that you will like to enter the forecast on an phantom part, and then distribute this forecast down to the base flow parts. Example can be that we have a wine brand as a phantom part and we want to figure out in which bottle sizes we want to purchase/manufacture this wine into. To support this scenario you will need to have the right group selections in Demand Planning, you need to have one group that represents the phantom part (the brand in this example) in this example we have used the Prime Commodity for this. Then you need another group to represent the different bottle sizes in this example we have used the second commodity for this in the example here. The first thing you start with is to select the phantom part that you want to forecast, this is done by selection the part in the prime commodity, then we need to enter the total sales volume for this brand. Note that you can enter the volume in any of the units available in Demand Planning. Then you open the Distributed adjustment dialog and select the target which is forecast in this case, then you select what to base the distribution on forecast or history. The next is to decide what to distribute by in this case we want to distribute among the different bottle sizes which we used the second commodity for that, so we select second commodity for the first key. This is enough if you only want one percentage per bottle size if you and one percentage per period and bottle size you can add periods as distribution key 2. The final selection is as always the Source Conditions here you set what should be the base for the distribution, again keeping it empty takes every thing. The options here are endless but on likely setting is to select the flow and the a phantom part that you want to select the percentages from. Then you need to set the Flow id and the right phantom part in the prime commodity field in this case.
This is a combination of the above to that can be solved by having 2 distributions in the same dialog (clicking add distribution) you can the select to first distribute the phantom part between the different flows, and then find which different bottle sizes to have for each flow, or you can first divide into bottle sizes on the combined flow and then split the qty's into the different flows.
Distribution Adjustment functionality is available for the queried group of forecast parts. Here the adjustment is done at queried group level and distributed down to the base flow parts (e.g. stock keeping unit). Creating a combined flow for the queried group of forecast parts will be one of the alternative options available for user. However, query facilitates more advance methods of grouping forecast parts.
The server will be locked for other users during the update of forecast. The source conditions in the query will have to be defined as usual. However, only the flows included in the query will count in the percentage distribution. As shown in table 1, a query has been run to select forecast parts related to Flow ID 2 and 3. Based on the new functionality, it is possible to distribute the aggregated Adjusted Demand among queried Flow ID 2 and 3 using distributed adjustments.
| Flow | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Total |
| Reference | 20 | 65 | 90 | 115 | 290 |
| % all flow | 6,896552 | 22,41379 | 31,03448 | 39,65517 | 100 |
| % Query flows | 41,93548 | 58,06452 |
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This window contains:
Target: This is where the values are going to be distributed to, there are 2 values forecast and Life Cycle. Forecast copies the adjusted forecast line to the adjusted forecast line on the base flow level, Life Cycle copies the start level and saturation level fields to the base flow level.
Start Period: First period to be affected by the distributed adjustment. If target is set to Life Cycle this setting is disenabled.
Last Period: The last period to be affected by the distributed adjustment. If target is set to Life Cycle this setting is disenabled.
Based On: Select what to base the distribution on, 2 values forecast and history, if you use forecast the adjusted forecast is used when computing the distribution, if you use history the average historical sales over the last year is used. History can not be used if you want to distribute by periods.
Distribute by: Here you select which field you want to distribute on, for example if you stand on combined flow you can select to distribute by Flow, this will give you a percentage of each base flow in the combined flow. You can in addition to this also decide to distribute by periods as well then you will get a unique percentage per period and flow.
Source Conditions: Here you define which parts or group of parts that is going to be used as a reference of your distribution. If you leave it empty you will use all parts as the reference for the distribution. Here you can select a specific part or a group of parts or a combination of groups.
Calc Distribution: Displays the resulting distribution in the spread sheet. It is displayed in percentages, the percentages can be manually changed if you like.
Add Distribution: Adds another distribution tab, that allows you to define another set of distribution rules. Used when you want to do complex distributions like a combination example 2 and 3 mentioned above.
Normalize distribution: Used when you have changed the percentages manually and want to bring the sum of percentages equal to 100%.
Delete Distribution: Deletes the added distribution tab, the one you added by pushing Add Distribution.
Generate Result: Shows the resulting distribution in real the selected unit for all base flow part and periods.
Apply: Applies the adjustment to the base flow parts.
Close: Cancels/closes the dialog box, with out doing any adjustment to the base flow parts.