Advanced Planning User Defined Demand Plan Upload
This article will describe the steps to upload a demand plan as opposed to editing directly in DemandCaster. This method is Advanced Planning application.
This article focuses specifically on the upload process. It is a companion to the article Advanced Planning Demand Plan Download.
Please note that there is no need to download a demand plan as a pre-requisite to uploading a plan.
Please note that DemandCaster will not process the user defined forecast file if the demand plan or pricing columns are not correctly configured and when there are nodes which are not assigned to a parent node. In theses cases, the errors need to be addressed and file re-uploaded for the changes to be applied.
DemandCaster has a requirement that uploaded text files have UTF8 encoding. If your text file has anything other than UTF8 encoding, when saving the file from excel, check to make sure the encoding is UTF8. If not, change to UTF8 and save.
Prepare the demand plan upload
- Only upload the demand plans that you would like to change.
- If you wish to not change a period, leave the period blank in the file. Making the value 0 in a period will change the demand plan or price to 0.
- Dates and number formats follow the upload culture settings noted in the article Date and Number Formats and Customer Specific Currency
- Date used for the period will align with the calendar the company is using. If standard month is used, the start date will be the first of the month. If 4-4-5 is used, the start date of the month will be the specific date of the monthly period. The date for weeks will be the start of the week set in the option "Week start" in the company (business node) settings.
- If you download the demand plan report per the article Advanced Planning Demand Plan Download, columns marked with *** are automatically removed during the upload process. There is no need to remove these columns in advance.
- The sequence of the columns is important for the transformation. The level columns should be followed by the unit plan by weeks or months and then unit price by weeks or months will follow.
- The unit upload date header must be the date period followed by "-unit" i.e. 1/1/2020-unit. The date format will follow your companies date format.
- The price upload date header must be the date period followed by "-price" i.e. 1/1/2020-price. The date format will follow your companies date format.
- Pricing may be uploaded above the item level as an average price.
- Make sure there are no empty columns being saved in your excel. At times excel may add invisible columns and rows that are saved in the text file. These will cause errors in the upload. If you run into this issue, we recommend moving the data to a clean spreadsheet prior to saving as a text file particularly when using a downloaded files as the basis of your data.
- You may also enter new customer/item demand plans that do not currently exist. These will be automatically created as part of the upload.
An upload may be executed at any level of an existing hierarchy within context or out of context (excluding the company level). The user defined demand plan values will be applied as long as the node in a level is within a complete hierarchy chain. If the chain is broken in anyway, the value will not be applied.
The example below is an upload based on a downloaded demand plan report. The hierarchy is customer > Item > Location. The demand plan values are at the lowest level of this hierarchy which in this example is Locations. The buckets are calendar months.
Please note that the base entities in DemandCaster are item, customer, and location. If these columns are included in your upload file, the column header should be Item, Customer, and Location. Do not add "code" to the column header.
Save the file as a tab delimited text file with the name userdefinedsopforecast.txt
Compress the tab delimited file
Upload the zipped file
Follow the upload steps as described in the Manually Uploading Data article.
DemandCaster flags the periods that are overwritten with a user defined value and the change log makes an entry named 'UDF Change Uploaded'. The upload also logs an error if the upload tries to edit a forecast with forecast flag disabled.
Review Upload Errors
Reviewing demand plan upload errors follows a different process than reviewing errors against the standard data uploads.
To review Advanced Business Planning demand plan upload errors, follow the steps provided in the article Reviewing Demand Plan Uploads for Errors.
Spot Checking Demand Plan against Upload
At times, users may want to spot check the demand plan to ensure the upload was properly applied. To do so, we recommend downloading a demand plan with the same hierarchy that the data was uploaded. In the example above, we would create a Customer > Item > Location page hierarchy and then download a demand plan report as described in the article Advanced Planning Demand Plan Download.
You may also simply search for an entity to review. as described in the article Advanced Planning Search.
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