COVID-19 has brought with it some massive swings in demand in a very short period of time. For some companies, this event has yielded a significant loss in sales and for others a significant increase in sales. We have not seen any company that is currently operating in a business as usual approach. In light of this, we released a new feature to better help those experiencing sales loss.

First, a quick definition of an Event. In DemandCaster Advanced Supply Chain Planning, an event is something that is either planned or unplanned that is outside of the normal sales process that changes the pattern of demand. It could be a promotion, change in pricing, or something as extreme as a pandemic. To ensure these "Events" are managed outside the normal sell through process, DemandCaster has a section in Advanced Planning named "Events" to allow users to include the impact of out of the ordinary demand events without having to override the base plan. This also helps in future forecasting by removing the affect of the event against sales history.

Note: At present we do not support creating events in the past. This is in our roadmap and will be addressed at some point in the future.

For this example, we have created an event named COVID-19. Creating an event is no different than creating a page in the Demand Plan view. At the company level a negative demand plan is entered into the units change row to reflect a loss in demand. Once the Event is entered, it can then be approved so that it is applied against the demand plan. Additional documentation will be provided in support of this feature. In the meantime, please contact support for any assistance.

The Planner Action functionality is designed to communicate what replenishment order actions are required to meet forecasted and customer order demand by item and by location (if DRP is enabled). This releases addresses frequently requested enhancements to the Planner Action interface to improve usability. This is applicable to production orders, transfer orders, and purchase orders. In summary,

• Action messaging is now line specific
• Postpone and cancel messaging is no longer mixed with other order messaging
• All Open purchase, production, and transfer orders which are past due will be registered as late in the planner action UI. Late orders are identified via the drop down status filter.
• Adds total value of the suggested order to the screen
• Adds tool tips when hovering the mouse pointer over the order number to be postponed, cancelled or late to communicate the quantity of the order

For All Open Purchase / Shop orders which are on a bucket where the Days on hand is bigger than "Excess Inventory Threshold" system setting will be considered as Postpone. In case there is no demand for that SKU those orders will be considered as Cancel. The formula that calculates the Days on Hand is (Ending On Hand in the periods) / (Next 30 days average total demand)

We will also be releasing improvements to the editing process within the item detail view within the coming weeks.

Added a feature to allow the revert edit process in Advanced Planning to also be applied to manually created item, location, and customer relationships.