Customers Change Their Forecasted Values

[Former Member]

Can someone please help us? We ask our customers to provide forecasted requirements for several weeks out. Because we have manually spot-checked these forecasted qtys, we know that there are times when our customers change their forecast qtys from one week to the next. When their forecast qtys decrease, we run the risk of having excess and obolete material, as well as excess inventory. When their forecasts increase, we most likely will incur premium freight charges. The problem is this: it is possible for us to manually record and track the forecasts from week to week for a handful of materials for a given customer. However, we would like to record the forecasts (export the data) for all materials with all of our customers so that when they change their forecasts, we know exactly how they have changed them. We have SAP release 4.6. Is there a transaction that will enable us to download all of our customers' forecasts? Most of the fields that we require are only in structures, not tables. I have spent a considerable amount of time searching this and other web sites with no luck.

[Jelena]

I don't think there is any standard functionality to store the customer's "forecast". The only forecasting feature I'm aware of is to forecast your own purchases based on sales or whatever.

Inquiry document is probably the closest to what you're describing, but I've never worked with it myself. There is also something named "Potential Analysis" in the menu, which seems to be using the LIS planning features.

As always, you can create your own Z table and a transaction (or an interface) to enter and store this information. I'm not sure though what's the point of storing this data in SAP - you might as well put it into an Excel or something. What do you expect to happen with this "forecast" in SAP?