The Demand Planning application includes three planning levels by default in the Forecast and Demand Planning hierarchy builders:

1. Customer
2. Item
3. Location

Additional levels may be created as described below.

In order to prevent overwhelming the system and allow it to operate more efficiently - the maximum forecast hierarchy levels was limited to 6. The warning message will be popped up if more than 6 levels added into hierarchy tree and the system will not allow to save it.

Advanced Planning supports additional levels that can be created to view, edit, and forecast demand. To do so, you must create the levels first.

In Advanced Planning, select the Hierarchy menu option.

1. Click the "+" button to create a new level
2. Enter the level name (must match the upload file)
3. Choose the level type from one of the three options of item, customer, or location. Please note that a level and node relationship is one to many.
4. Click Save

In the above example, we have created two levels Classification and Classification detail.

Once the levels are created, an upload file needs to be prepared.

To prep the file, the first column will always be the base entity to which the levels will be added. You may have more than one base entity in column A. For example, a single file may have customer and item hierarchy. You would then only populate the columns associated with the base entity.

The column A name must be "Base Level" - you may have more than one level per base entity:

• Customer
• Location
• Item

Column B will be the item, customer, or product code related to the hierarchy. The column name must be named "Code"

Column C and above will be the previously created hierarchy level for each base entity. You may have multiple levels (attributes) against each base entity. Leave blank the columns in the row that are not associated to the specific base entity.

In the example below we are going to build customer and item based hierarchies. Starting in column C and above, each unique hierarchy attribute will be added for each item or customer (and location if locations also have a hierarchy). In the example below we are adding the attributes of Channel against the customer and Product Class against item.  Just make sure to place the attribute in the correct column based on the base entity.

Once the file is prepared, name the file "planninghierarchy" and save as a tab delimited text file.

Upload the file by following the steps in the support article Manually Uploading Data.

Upon the completion of the upload process, review any errors in the Data Upload section error log. Reported errors are as follows:

• Not existing level
• None of the base levels exist as a column
• A not existing product, customer, location
• Empty string

In the example below, there is a reported error where the file was uploaded without previously creating the levels.

With the addition of new entities, it is important that the hierarchies are appropriately maintained. We recommend, on at least a monthly basis, to review the Hierarchy Associations tab for any missing associations.  To learn more, please review the article Adding Nodes not Previously Associated to Levels.