Katana uses demand forecasting to leverage both historical sales data and manual adjustments to accurately predict future demand.
This functionality supports effective inventory and purchasing strategies, accommodating seasonal variations and sales events. Users can customize forecasts to align with their specific business needs, ensuring optimal stock levels and planning precision.
Maybe your product has a big demand during summer or you see a spike in sales during Black Friday week, or you want to launch a new product without sales history? You can manually set the initial forecasts to help the system better understand your demand.
Editing a Weekly forecast
To edit an automatic forecast, make sure the Activate forecast demand toggle on the Plan screen is enabled.
From the Plan screen, if you click on an item to open the detail view, you'll see a weekly overview of its demand and supply, including the automatically calculated forecast.
To edit a week's forecasted demand, select the cell and enter the forecast quantity for the selected week.
In the example below, we've increased the forecast across four weeks to ensure June's higher expected demand is fully covered.
You can click on the edit icon to see an automatically calculated forecast.
Edit a forecasted week to override the calculated number. If you want to return to the system's automatic forecast, just delete the number you entered.
Similar to an automatically created forecast, a manually entered forecast will suggest timing and quantities for replenishment orders.
Editing a Monthly forecast
You can also edit the forecast based on monthly consumption numbers. Functionality follows the same principle as shown in the Weekly edits above.
Editing a Monthly forecast will override the correlating weekly consumption numbers. This change will not affect the days that are outside a specific month, so the starting or the ending week might include a combination of both monthly forecasts divided by daily numbers:
If you edit a Weekly forecast and the week is in two different months then both months are updated:
Creating a new product's forecast
If you're launching a new product without demand history, you can manually input a forecast for a few weeks and then let the automatic forecast take over once there's enough real demand to predict future trends.
Alternatively, you could manually create a longer-term forecast to maintain control and prevent the automatic system from adjusting your predictions.
To see how your manually entered forecast affects future inventory levels, check the recalculated In stock values for the upcoming weeks. If you notice an increase in negative numbers, this indicates how much more you need to replenish during these periods to be sure you don't run out of stock.
Note: Calculations will sometimes have a slight delay. The temporary warning message is to reassure you the numbers will soon be corrected.
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