This article covers sales and demand forecasting within Stock&Buy.
Demand forecasting is the art of predicting customer demand to ensure there is enough stock to satisfy any new incoming sales and maintain a high service level for your business. Demand forecasting involves techniques including both informal methods, such as educated guesses, and quantitative methods, such as the use of historical sales data and statistical techniques or current data from test markets.
Stock&Buy uses a quantitative technique to forecast demand for each product and variations. A mathematical procedure is used to look at a predefined number of past sales days and attempts to fit a mathematical model, which is then used to forecast future demand.
Let’s see how the details on how the forecasting works in Stock&Buy.
Parameters of forecasting algorithm
Stock&Buy allows users to choose their own parameters like the base time interval, days to forecast, growth factor and etc. Let’s see what parameters you can set to train the forecasting model.
Here is how you can access the parameters:
- In your Stock&Buy account, go to Forecasting
- Click on Parameters on the left side of the page
Now let’s see what parameters are available in the Forecasting module.
You can choose a predefined time range that the system offers, or set a custom date range.
The forecasting view gives you useful insights into how your variations are selling, the total incoming quantities (these are calculated from your open purchase orders), available stock levels, allocated stock, the demand forecast and the most useful measure of all, the total number of units to purchase to fulfill the predicted demand.
Each row in the table represents the forecast for each variation. Clicking on a chart symbol (
) will show details about the variation being selected.
