People new to the jobs of “demand planner” or “supply planner” are likely to have questions about the various forecasting terms and methods used in their jobs. This note may help by explaining these terms and showing how they relate.

Demand Planning

Demand planning is about how much of what you have to sell will go out the door in the future, e.g., how many what-nots you will sell next quarter. Here are six methodologies often used in demand planning.

• Statistical Forecasting
  • These methods use demand history to forecast future values. The two most common methods are curve fitting and data smoothing.
  • Curve fitting matches a simple mathematical function, like the equation for a straight line (y= a +b∙t) or an interest-rate type curve (y=a∙b^t), to the demand history. Then it extends that line or curve forward in time as the forecast.
  • In contrast, data smoothing does not result in an equation. Instead it sweeps through the demand history, averaging values along the way, to create a smoother version of the history. These methods are called exponential smoothing and moving average. In the simplest case (i.e., in the absence of trend or seasonality, for which variants exist), the goal is to estimate the current average level of demand and use that as the forecast.
  • These methods produce “point forecasts”, which are single-number estimates for each future time period (e.g., “Sales in March will be 218 units”). Sometimes they come with estimates of potential forecast error bolted on using separate models of demand variability (“Sales in March will be 218 ± 120 units”).

• Probabilistic Forecasting
  • This approach keys on the randomness of demand and works hard to estimate forecast uncertainty. It regards forecasting less as an exercise in cranking out specific numbers and more as an exercise in risk management.
  • It explicitly models the variability in demand and uses that to present results in the form of large numbers of scenarios constructed to show the full range of possible demand sequences. These are especially useful in tactical supply planning tasks, such as setting reorder points and order quantities.

• Causal Forecasting
  • Statistical forecasting models use as inputs only the past demand history of the item in question. They regard the up-and-down wiggles in the demand plot as the end result of myriad unnamed factors (interest rates, the price of tea in China, phases of the moon, whatever). Causal forecasting explicitly identifies one or more influences (interest rates, advertising spend, competitors’ prices, …) that could plausibly influence sales. Then it builds an equation relating the numerical values of these “drivers” or “causal factors” to item sales. The equation’s coefficients are estimated by “regression analysis”.

• Judgemental Forecasting
  • Golden Gut. Despite the general availability of gobs of data, some companies pay little attention to the numbers and give greater weight to the subjective judgements of an executive deemed to have a “Golden Gut”, which allows him or her to use “gut feel” to predict what future demand will be. If that person has great experience, has spent a career actually looking at the numbers, and is not prone to wishful thinking or other forms of cognitive bias, the Golden Gut can be a cheap, fast way to plan. But there is good evidence from studies of companies run this way that relying on the Golden Gut is risky.
  • Group Consensus. More common is a process that uses a periodic meeting to create a group consensus forecast. The group will have access to shared objective data and forecasts, but members will also have knowledge of factors that may not be measured well or at all, such as consumer sentiment or the stories relayed by sales reps. It is helpful to have a shared, objective starting point for these discussions consisting of some sort of objective statistical analysis. Then the group can consider adjusting the statistical forecast. This process anchors the forecast in objective reality but exploits all the other information available outside the forecasting database.
  • Scenario Generation. Sometimes several people will meet and discuss “strategic what-if” questions. “What if we lose our Australian customers?” “What if our new product roll-out is delayed by six months?” “What if our sales manager for the mid-west jumps to a competitor?” These bigger-picture questions can have implications for item-specific forecasts and might be added to any group-consensus forecasting meeting.

• New product forecasting
  • New products, by definition, have no sales history to support statistical, probability, or causal forecasting. Subjective forecasting methods can always be used here, but these often rely on a dangerous ratio of hopes to facts. Fortunately, there is at least partial support for objective forecasting in the form of curve fitting.
  • A graph of the cumulative sales of an item often describes some sort of “S-curve”, i.e., a graph that starts at zero, builds up, then levels off to a final lifetime total sales. The curve gets its name because it looks like a letter S somehow smeared and stretched to the right. Now there are an infinite number of S-curves, so forecasters typically pick an equation and subjectively specify some key parameter values, like when sales will hit 25%, 50% and 75% of total lifetime sales and what that final level will be. This is also overtly subjective, but it produces detailed period-by-period forecasts that can be updated as experience builds up. Finally, S-curves are sometimes shaped to match the known history of a similar, predecessor product (“Sales for our last gizmo looked like this, so let’s use that as a template.”).

Supply Planning

Demand planning feeds into supply planning by predicting future sales (e.g., for finished goods) or usage (e.g., for spare parts). Then it is up to supply planning to make sure the items in question will be available to sell or to use.

• Dependent demand
  • Dependent demand is demand that can be determined by its relationship to demand for another item. For instance, a bill of materials may show that a little red wagon consists of a body, a pull bar, four wheels, two axles, and various fasteners to keep the wheels on the axles and connect the pull bar to the body. So if you hope to sell 10 little red wagons, you’d better make 10, which means you need 10×2 = 20 axles, 10×4 = 40 wheels, etc. Dependent demand governs raw materials purchasing, component and subsystems purchasing, even personnel hiring (10 wagons need one high-school kid to put them together over a 1 hour shift).
  • If you have multiple products with partially overlapping bills of materials, you have a choice of two forecasting approaches. Suppose you sell not only little red wagons but little blue baby carriages and that both use the same axles. To predict the number of axles you need you could (1) predict the dependent demand for axles from each product and add the forecasts or (2) observe the total demand history for axles as its own time series and forecast that separately. Which works better is an empirical question that can be tested.

• Inventory management
  • Inventory management entails many different tasks. These include setting inventory control parameters such as reorder points and order quantities, reacting to contingencies such as stockouts and order expediting, setting staffing levels, and selecting suppliers.

• Forecasting plays a role in the first three. The number of replenishment orders that will be made in a year for each product determines how many people are needed to cut PO’s. The number and severity of stockouts in a year determines the number of contingencies that must be handled. The number of PO’s and stockouts in a year will be random but be governed by the choices of inventory control parameters. The implications of any such choices can be modeled by inventory simulations. These simulations will be driven by detailed demand scenarios generated by probabilistic forecasts.

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Every field, including forecasting, accumulates folk wisdom that eventually starts masquerading as “best practices.”  These best practices are often wise, at least in part, but they often lack context and may not be appropriate for certain customers, industries, or business situations.  There is often a catch, a “Yes, but”. This note is about six usually true forecasting precepts that nevertheless do have their caveats.

1. Organize your company around a one-number forecast. This sounds sensible: it’s good to have a shared vision. But each part of the company will have its own idea about which number is the number. Finance may want quarterly revenue, Marketing may want web site visits, Sales may want churn, Maintenance may want mean time to failure. For that matter, each unit probably has a handful of key metrics. You don’t need a slogan – you need to get your job done.

2. Incorporate business knowledge into a collaborative forecasting process. This is a good general rule, but if your collaborative process is flawed, messing with a statistical forecast via management overrides can decrease accuracy. You don’t need a slogan – you need to measure and compare the accuracy of any and all methods and go with the winners.

3. Forecast using causal modeling. Extrapolative forecasting methods take no account of the underlying forces driving your sales, they just work with the results. Causal modeling takes you deeper into the fundamental drivers and can improve both accuracy and insight. However, causal models (implemented through regression analysis) can be less accurate, especially when they require forecasts of the drivers (“predictions of the predictors”) rather than simply plugging in recorded values of lagged predictor variables. You don’t need a slogan: You need a head-to-head comparison.

4. Forecast demand instead of shipments. Demand is what you really want, but “composing a demand signal” can be tricky: what do you do with internal transfers? One-off’s?  Lost sales? Furthermore, demand data can be manipulated.  For example, if customers intentionally don’t place orders or try to game their orders by ordering too far in advance, then order history won’t be better than shipment history.  At least with shipment history, it’s accurate:  You know what you shipped. Forecasts of shipments are not forecasts of  “demand”, but they are a solid starting point.

5. Use Machine Learning methods. First, “Machine learning” is an elastic concept that includes an ever-growing set of alternatives. Under the hood of many ML advertised models is just an auto-pick an extrapolative forecast method (i.e., best fit) which while great at forecasting normal demand, has been around since the 1980’s (Smart Software was the first company to release an auto-pick method for the PC).   ML models are data hogs that require larger data sets than you may have available. Properly choosing then training an ML model requires a level of statistical expertise that is uncommon in many manufacturing and distribution businesses. You might want to find somebody to hold your hand before you start playing this game.

6. Removing outliers creates better forecasts. While it is true that very unusual spikes or drops in demand will mask underlying demand patterns such as trend or seasonality, it isn’t always true that you should remove the spikes. Often these demand surges reflect the uncertainty that can randomly interfere with your business and thus need to be accounted for.  Removing this type of data from your demand forecast model might make the data more predictable on paper but will leave you surprised when it happens again. So, be careful about removing outliers, especially en masse.

Is safety stock regarded as emergency spares or as a day-to-day buffer against spikes in demand? Knowing the difference and configuring your ERP properly will make a big difference to your bottom line.

The Safety Stock field in your ERP system can mean very different things depending on the configuration. Not understanding these differences and how they impact your bottom line is a common issue we’ve seen arise in implementations of our software.

Implementing inventory optimization software starts with new customers completing the technical implementation to get data flowing.  They then receive user training and spend weeks carefully configuring their initial safety stocks, reorder levels, and consensus demand forecasts with Smart IP&O.  The team becomes comfortable with Smart’s key performance predictions (KPPs) for service levels, ordering costs, and inventory on hand, all of which are forecasted using the new stocking policies.

But when they save the policies and forecasts to their ERP test system, sometimes the orders being suggested are far larger and more frequent than they expected, driving up projected inventory costs.

When this happens, the primary culprit is how the ERP is configured to treat safety stock.  Being aware of these configuration settings will help planning teams better set expectations and achieve the expected outcomes with less effort (and cause for alarm!).

Here are the three common examples of ERP safety stock configurations:

Configuration 1. Safety Stock is treated as emergency stock that can’t be consumed. If a breach of safety stock is predicted, the ERP system will force an expedite no matter the cost so the inventory on hand never falls below safety stock, even if a scheduled receipt is already on order and scheduled to arrive soon.

Configuration 2. Safety Stock is treated as Buffer stock that is designed to be consumed. The ERP system will place an order when a breach of safety stock is predicted but on hand inventory will be allowed to fall below the safety stock. The buffer stock protects against stockout during the resupply period (i.e., the lead time).

Configuration 3. Safety Stock is ignored by the system and treated as a visual planning aid or rule of thumb. It is ignored by supply planning calculations but used by the planner to help make manual assessments of when to order.

Note: We never recommend using the safety stock field as described in Configuration 3. In most cases, these configurations were not intended but result from years of improvisation that have led to using the ERP in a non-standard way.  Generally, these fields were designed to programmatically influence the replenishment calculations.  So, the focus of our conversation will be on Configurations 1 and 2. 

Forecasting and inventory optimization systems are designed to compute forecasts that will anticipate inventory draw down and then calculate safety stocks sufficient to protect against variability in demand and supply. This means that the safety stock is intended to be used as a protective buffer (Configuration 2) and not as emergency sparse (Configuration 3).  It is also important to understand that, by design, the safety stock will be consumed approximately 50% of the time.

Why 50%? Because actual orders will exceed an unbiased forecast half of the time. See the graphic below illustrating this.  A “good” forecast should yield the value that will come closest to the actual most often so actual demand will either be higher or lower without bias in either direction.

If you configured your ERP system to properly allow consumption of safety stock, then the on hand inventory might look like the graph below.  Note that some safety stock is consumed but avoided a stockout.  The service level you target when computing safety stock will dictate how often you stockout before the replenishment order arrives.  Average inventory is roughly 60 units over the time horizon in this scenario.

If your ERP system is configured to not allow consumption of safety stock and treats the quantity entered in the safety stock field more like emergency spares, then you will have a massive overstock!  Your inventory on hand would look like the graph below with orders being expedited as soon as a breach of safety stock is expected. Average inventory is roughly 90 units, a 50% increase compared to when you allowed safety stock to be consumed.

We often are asked, “Why is the software driving up the inventory?” The answer is that Smart isn’t driving it in either direction – the inputs are driving it, and those inputs are controlled by the users (or admins). Here are four things you can do to get the results you expect.

1. Confirm that your service level targets are commensurate with what you want for that item or group of items. Setting very high targets (95% or more) will likely drive inventory up if you have been coasting along at a lower level and are OK with being there. It’s possible you’ve never achieved the new higher service level but customers have not complained.  Figure out what service level has worked by evaluating historical reports on performance and set your targets accordingly. But keep in mind that competitors may beat you on item availability if you keep using your father’s service level targets.

2. Make sure your understanding of “service level” aligns with the software system’s definition. You may be measuring performance based on how often you ship within one week from receipt of the customer order, whereas the software is targeting reorder points based on your ability to ship right away, not within a week. Clearly the latter will require more inventory to hit the same “service level.” For instance, a 75% same-day service level may correspond to a 90% same-week service level. In this case, you are really comparing apples to oranges. If this is the reason for the excess stock, then determine what “same day” service level is needed to get you to your desired “same week” service level and enter that into the software. Using the less-stringent same-day target will drop the inventory, sometimes very significantly.

3. Evaluate the lead time inputs. We’ve seen instances in which lead times had been inflated to trick old software into producing desired results. Modern software tracks suppliers’ performance by recording their actual lead times over multiple orders, then it takes account of lead time variability in its simulations of daily operations. Watch out if your lead times are fixed at one value that was decided on in the distant past and isn’t current.

4. Check your demand signal. You have lots of historical transactions in your ERP system that can be used in many ways to determine the demand history. If you are using signals such as transfers, or you are not excluding returns, then you may be overstating demand. Spend a little time on defining “demand” in the way that makes most sense for your situation.

Outside of work, you may have heard the famous dictum “Correlation is not causation.” It may sound like a piece of theoretical fluff that, though involved in a recent Noble Prize in economics, isn’t relevant to your work as a demand planner. Is so, you may be only partially correct.

Extrapolative vs Causal Models

Most demand forecasting uses extrapolative models. Also called time-series models, these forecast demand using only the past values of an item’s demand. Plots of past values reveal trend and seasonality and volatility, so there is a lot they are good for. But there is another type of model – causal models —that can potentially improve forecast accuracy beyond what you can get from extrapolative models.

Causal models bring more input data to the forecasting task: information on presumed forecast “drivers” external to the demand history of an item. Examples of potentially useful causal factors include macroeconomic variables like the inflation rate, the rate of GDP growth, and raw material prices. Examples not tied to the national economy include industry-specific growth rates and your own and competitors’ ad spending.  These variables are usually used as inputs to regression models, which are equations with demand as an output and causal variables as inputs.

Forecasting using Causal Models

Many firms have an S&OP process that involves a monthly review of statistical (extrapolative) forecasts in which management adjusts forecasts based on their judgement. Often this is an indirect and subjective way to work causal models into the process without doing the regression modeling.

To actually make a causal regression model, first you have to nominate a list of potentially-useful causal predictor variables. These may come from your subject matter expertise. For example, suppose you manufacture window glass. Much of your glass may end up in new homes and new office buildings. So, the number of new homes and offices being built are plausible predictor variables in a regression equation.

There is a complication here: if you are using the equation to predict something, you must first predict the predictors. For example, sales of glass next quarter may be strongly related to numbers of new homes and new office buildings next quarter. But how many new homes will there be next quarter? That’s its own forecasting problem. So, you have a potentially powerful forecasting model, but you have extra work to do to make it usable.

There is one way to simplify things: if the predictor variables are “lagged” versions of themselves. For example, the number of new building permits issued six months ago may be a good predictor of glass sales next month. You don’t have to predict the building permit data – you just have to look it up.

Is it a causal relationship or just a spurious correlation?

Causal models are the real deal: there is an actual mechanism that relates the predictor variable to the predicted variable. The example of predicting glass sales from building permits is an example.

A correlation relationship is more iffy. There is a statistical association that may or may not provide a solid basis for forecasting. For example, suppose you sell a product that happens to appeal most strongly to Dutch people but you don’t realize this. The Dutch are, on average, the tallest people in Europe. If your sales are increasing and the average height of Europeans is increasing, you might use that relationship to good effect. However, if the proportion of Dutch in the Euro zone is decreasing while the average height is increasing because the mix of men versus women is shifting toward men, what can go wrong? You will expect sales to increase because average height is increasing. But your sales are really mostly to the Dutch, and their relative share of the population is shrinking, so your sales are really going to decrease instead. In this case the association between sales and customer height is a spurious correlation.

How can you tell the difference between true and spurious relationships? The gold standard is to do a rigorous scientific experiment. But you are not likely to be in position to do that. Instead, you have to rely on your personal “mental model” of how your market works. If your hunches are right, then your potential causal models will correlate with demand and causal modeling will pay off for you, either to supplement extrapolative models or to replace them.