A forecast is the expected consumption of a part or group of parts as expressed in quantity or monetary value. The forecast is often based on historical results, known market activities, knowledge about new products, local market variations, and experience. Different business areas can store their own forecasts. Master scheduling (MS) and project master scheduling are based on the forecast you enter and the actual backlog of orders. Based on this information, they create a master schedule or a project master schedule, i.e. a manufacturing plan or a purchasing plan. MS means matching your company's sales forecast to the company's available resources and capacity in order to balance supply and demand.
Forecast consumption is the process of decrementing forecast based on the registration of actual orders. The essence of forecast consumption is that forecast, together with actual demand, forms a blended picture of the total demand over the planning horizon. You can also say that actual demand consumes forecast in the forecast consumption process.
When an actual order is received, the system subtracts it from the forecast in the period the order is scheduled to ship. You can choose to consume forecast in the period corresponding to the customer need date or in the original quoted shipment date. If there is no forecast remaining for the period, the system can consume forecast in earlier or later time periods. When a customer order line is booked or changed, a check can be made against the unconsumed forecast to determine whether the order line can be fulfilled or not. This process is further described in About Available to Promise.
IFS Cloud offers different tools for customer order promising suitable for different business scenarios.
Availability Check.
The availability check monitors the development
of plannable qty within the product’s expected lead time. Only parts with
the Availability Check option enabled on Inventory Part are considered.
Availability of components and manufacturing capacity are not considered
Capabilty Check
Multilevel material and capacity check. Only parts
defined as Promise Planned in Inventory Part/Manufacturing tab are considered.
Can be used also for configured and Make to Order scenarios.
Available to Promise
Uses the master schedule (MPS) as data source
for customer order promising, hence the parts must be master scheduled.
To use this promising method also Online Consumption on Inventory Part must
be enabled.
It’s not recommended to use more than one order promising tool for the same part at the same time.
Master Scheduling is a tool for turning forecasts into production plans. Based on registered forecasts supply proposals are created taking lot sizing and lead times into consideration. When actual demands come in, they are netted/consumed against the forecasts. This demand/supply situation is used for the available to promise process.
In general, The ATP calculation can be performed in two different ways
Against Unconsumed Forecast
This principle assumes that we
will be able to supply according to forecast, i.e. that the remaining unconsumed
forecast can be promised to new customer order lines
Against Unconsumed Supply
This principle instead looks at actual
existing supplies and how much of those that can be promised after existing
demands have been deducted. Within the planning time fence there can be
a significant difference to unconsumed forecast.
In addition to a generic check that checks if the part is available at
all on a certain date, another check can be performed to see if the part
is available according to allocated quantity for an entity of a customer
dimension in the required period. A customer dimension could be customer,
customer stat group, Market, region, District or Country. Period could be
week or month.
This is further described in About Forecast and ATP
by Customer Dimension.
The ATP function considers various parameters and their settings
This is the main switch that turns on the MS ATP functionality and also make demands get updated instantly when saving customer order/quotation lines
Defines if available quantity is evaluated against unconsumed supply or unconsumed forecast. Possible values are
Unconsumed Forecast
Available to Promise (Unconsumed Supply)
Defines if ATP should also cover customer dimension based availability and which dimension that will be used for aggregation per time period. Possible values are
Part
Customer
Customer Stat Group
Region
Market
District
Country
When Forecast By <> Part, this setting will control for which time period expected plannable quantity will be aggregated. Possible values are
Month
Week
When Forecast By <> Part, this setting will control how the allocation of expected plannable quantity will be performed. Possible values are
First Come First Served
Forecast Ratio
User Defined Ratio
Fixed Quantity Limit
When Forecast By <> Part this setting will control how the allocation of non-specifically defined customer dimensions will be allowed to use. Possible values are
Free
Restricted
For online consumption to take place, the Online Consumption option for the inventory part must be enabled, and the part you select must be a MS handled part with a forecast. In addition, for sales quotation lines, you must enable the Release for Planning option, on the sales quotation line.
The online consumption happens:
When you enter a new line.
When you increase the quantity of an existing line.
When you change any data on an existing line, that affects the due date.
When you decrease the quantity for an existing line.
When you cancel an existing line.
Online Consumption means that forecasts are consumed instantly when any of above events happen. This is to make sure the ATP check is performed on latest updated information.
Forecast Consumption is further described in About Forecast and Forecast Consumption
The Available to Promise (ATP) functionality is dependent on the Promised Method in the MS Level 1 Part page. The promised method can be either Available to Promise or Unconsumed Forecast.
Available to Promise:
- You can only enter or change a Customer Order/Quotation
Line if the sum of the stock-on-hand plus open supply, i.e., the total supply,
exceeds the demand quantity.
- You are not restricted by the Demand Time Fence (DTF), i.e. you can enter
or change lines within the DTF.
Unconsumed Forecast:
- You can only enter or change a Customer Order/Quotation
Line if sufficient unconsumed forecast exist. This goes for the entire horizon,
also outside the planning time fence (PTF).
- You are restricted by the
DTF, i.e. you cannot enter or change a within the DTF. This is a result
of the fact that you actually can’t have unconsumed forecast within DTF.