Seasonal Forecasting APO DP -

[Former Member]

Hello,

I am using seasonal forecast strategies for demand planning of a consumer goods company. The issue I have is i need to detect within my season ( 1 year) some important periods that alter the demand, for example the easter week. The problem is that every year easter happens in at different dates that varies each year, therefore I have to manually change the ocurrence of the curve to the proper date every year.

I would like to apply some king of flags to every year's easter week, in order to show the system how to read this data and be able to apply it to my forecast but I do not find any functionalities in the forecast profiles to implement this.

I would really appreciate if someone has any insight regarding this.

Thanks in advance!

Isabel

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Isabel,

I have the same problem and unfortunately the easiest way for me wast oestablish a dummy variable (=1 if Easter plus a lag, =0 otherwise) and run the forecast outside of SAP. I would then re-import the figures back.

Having said that, a possibility that we are trying is to create a dummy product whcih will only have demand for Easter and would be modelled as the differential demand against the running forecast. The planning forecast would then run on a revise BOM that would see both products as part of an assembly (in fact adding both demand points). It's still on it's early stages but it might work.

Then again the modelling of the "dummy" product is done outside SAP, I don't know of any functionality that would allow me to do it within SAP or it's modules.

I hope this helps somehow. Please let me know if you find a solution, I'd definetly be interest on that.

Regards,

Rodrigo