Nowadays, it is one of the most important issues for the inventory planning teams of companies to minimize inventory costs and prevent overselling. The variety of products and sales channels makes control and decision-making steps difficult in planning processes. It is the most basic rule of successful sales management to deliver the desired product to the customer as soon as possible through different channels.

Within the framework of all these requirements, effective demand forecasting, ensuring that in-system stocks are in the right quantities in the right channels, and planning new purchases within the safety stocks lead to the need for an application that will introduce demand forecasting and the data obtained from these systems into the supply and allocation processes.

The process is as follows:

• Formation of sales forecasting data
• Store > Store transfers (Optional)
• It is managed as Warehouse > Store transfers and purchasing.

Prodea special solution is aimed at managing supply and allocation processes with the data obtained from sales forecasting engines with the experience we have gained in projects for many years.

Basically;

·      Programme sets using the HANA embedded analytical structure that will quickly serve data for sales forecasting,

·      Constrain management cockpit where channel and store constraints are managed for supply and allocation,

·      Procurement programmes that supply goods to stores and channels from suppliers and distribution centres within the framework of constraints determined according to incoming forecasts data

·      It consists of inter-store transfer management (cross-transfer) components with special algorithms for managing stock balance between stores.

Sales Forecasting

It is one of the most important problems of retail to put the right product in the right place at the right time. Forecasting engines that use advanced statistical methods on one subject appear before us. These products take into account factors such as seasonality and campaign effects while forecasting and allow you to manage them. UDF (Unfied Demand Forecasting), the demand forecasting engine that comes with SAP's CAR (Customer Activity Repository), calculates the demands of stores and channels with advanced algorithms in a fully integrated manner with SAP Fashion and Retail systems.

Prodea Supply and Forecasting solution can be integrated with any non-SAP forecasting programme as well as using forecast data generated with CAR-UDF.

Link for detailed information about CAR-UDF: https://help.sap.com/viewer/e95c8443f589486bbfec99331049704a/4.0.3/en-US/2aafa351f10c245de10000000a44176d.html

Inter Store Transfer (Cross Transfer)

Prodea makes the transfer decision of the sales data generated by the cross transfer algorithm, which is a Prodea solution, from the store with excess stock, taking into account various criteria. Optionally, the transfer documents to be opened are reduced to the approval of the relevant department or automatically run for a certain day / time. Cross transfer solution works according to many parameters such as breakage index, store stock days.

The cross transfer programme can be used to manage the deteriorating stock balance independent of the supply and allocation process, or it can be positioned as part of the supply and allocation process according to the strategy to be determined.

Transfer from Warehouse to Store

Transfer orders are created from the central warehouse to the store within the framework of the constraints determined to meet the store sales data.

Purchasing

The purchase requirement for the central warehouse is calculated and purchase orders are created automatically by calculating warehouse transfers, uncompleted purchase orders, safety stock data and optionally return order data.

Supply Cockpit

In the cockpit for transfer orders and purchase orders it is possible to manage the following data. A few basic filters related to the selection screen are as follows:

• Material
• Purchasing group
• Commodity group
• Seller

A few basic parameters used for programme run control are as follows:

Review time: (Optional) Review time information is used in order calculations when it is defined in the system.

Supply Source control: Separate purchase orders are opened according to whether the product is supplied from the Central Warehouse or the store from the Supplier.

Safety stock: It is determined whether the safety stock will be taken into account to reduce the stock in the central warehouse periodically.

Schedule : A separate interface is designed for the user to manage the programme parameters. Thus, without any revision by the technical team, the programme can be run only in the date range and with the filter - parameter data desired by the user.

If the user wants to exclude forecast data and orders to be opened for certain product groups, the constraint management structure is used.

Constraint Management Cockpit

Constraint Management display is designed for periodic restriction operations that are desired to be used for stock movements. With this structure, constraint groups are created with the following criteria specified by the user:

- Commodity group

- Store no.

- Date of first entry

- Last date of entry

- Brand

- Price

- Supplier

For these constraint groups created, the transfer and order documents to be opened in the system are blocked. Which document type will be blocked can be changed parametrically. In addition, the user can choose which direction to block within the constraint group;

- Block Transfer

- Block Order

- Block Return to Warehouse

- Block Replenishment

- Block Returns from Supplier

Managing end-to-end demand forecasting, cross-transfer and ordering processes with Prodea solutions through the SAP system will provide a big advantage to make faster decisions, control processes and speed up the procurement process.