[Jennifer Wilkins]

We have a new customer agreement where the customer would like us to maintain a 3 month level of inventory based on their forecast.  Obviously, this is a rolling forecast and therefore level.  We were thinking we could use the coverage group, but when we have it set up to look out the 3 months, it is pulling the requirements to the date of that month’s forecast rather than all at once.  While typically this is the way it would work, we were wondering if there was any way to manipulate it to where the coverage group would look out the 3 months, but require all the product on the 1st month.  Any thoughts or ideas?

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Jennifer Wilkins
Aftermarket Operations Supervisor
Nidec Motor Corporation
St Louis MO
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[Jennifer Wilkins]

Unfortuantely, it is not stable 🙁

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Jennifer Wilkins
Aftermarket Operations Supervisor
Nidec Motor Corporation
St Louis MO
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[Hector Cazot]

Hi Jennifer,
For the Coverage Group you selected the Period type, looking forward (coverage period) 90 days? I don’t know if I’m understanding well but I think this setup should give you the result you are looking for (I try to draw it).

Maybe other option could be, if the forecast is not stable, to have a seasonable safety stock trying to replicate the seasonability of the forecast (if it has one), you find this in the Plan tab of the item having Min/Max coverage Group, Item coverage option, Min/Max tab; there you can place a different minimum/maximum stock by date.

Hope it helps,
Regards

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Hector Cazot
Consultant Sr.
Industry Systems and Solutions
Guatemala
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[Andrew Lencsak]

The forecast in AX is date based and doesn’t really offer the rolling forecast scenario solution. You could enter a forecast for all 3 months against the one date to get what you are looking for but once that date passes, the forecast demand will drop off the plan.
Kelly’s option makes sense to maintain the level of inventory. The safety stock/min can be the 3 months worth of demand and AX would require that inventory at the same time.

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Andrew Lencsak
Senior Application Consultant
eBECS
Atlanta GA
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[Dave Phillips]

Hi Jennifer –

I agree with Andrew’s approach of using a Forecast and achieving the rolling aspect by updating the Forecast as your customer provides new Forecast buckets. You could add a Minimum as Kelly suggested and you also could use a Coverage Group with a 90 day Coverage fence as Hector suggested.

What was unstable about the Forecast approach?

Thanks…..Dave

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Dave Phillips
MSFT Senior PFE
Microsoft
Fargo ND
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[Jennifer Wilkins]

If the forecast was stable, say 300 for March, 300 for April, and 300 for May, it would be easy to set a safety stock of 900.  But the forecast varies month to month.  What we are trying to do is avoid a lot of manual effort.  When we load the forecast and do what is decribed with the coverage group, it will pull March’s forecast for March and Aprils forecast into April.  But what I need is March, April and May to be pulled into March.  It appears we have our setups like described but it isn’t working like a rolling 3 month bucket.

JAN	FEB	MAR	APR	MAY	JUN	JUL	AUG	SEP	OCT	NOV	DEC
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12
5	30	5	21	74	18	32	7	8	5	0	5
7	30	29	102	200	96	43	59	32	32	17	23

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Jennifer Wilkins
Aftermarket Operations Supervisor
Nidec Motor Corporation
St Louis MO
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[Hector Cazot]

Hi Jennifer,
Can you share what Coverage Group has the item you are planning? And the parameters that this group has?

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Hector Cazot
Consultant Sr.
Industry Systems and Solutions
Guatemala
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[Andrew Lencsak]

Hi Jennifer, the reason for that is AX uses the forecast date as the date the inventory is required so it wouldn’t group those forecasts together to make/buy at once unless you manipulated it to do so. Someone earlier mentioned using a Period based coverage group, with your Period set to 90 days. This would mean that any demand that has a date within 90 days of the current date would only have one planned order for the entire quantity, rather than one planned order for every source of demand. This would probably be the closest to what you’re asking for.

Otherwise, you could just have one forecast date with the summed quantity of the 3 months on the date you want to plan for rather than actually entering 3 different forecast quantities, one for each month. So for your example, load all 900 onto one forecast date in March, rather than separating out each forecast.

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Andrew Lencsak
Senior Application Consultant
eBECS
Atlanta GA
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[Kelly (Kane) Gustafson]

You could set up a minimum on the item under Item coverage for the 3 month amount – if it is pretty stable. This way, MRP will always tell you to keep at least that much on the floor and build to that minimum stock level.

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Kelly Kane
Information Systems Specialist
Algood Food Company
Louisville KY
AXUG Kentucky Chapter Leader
http://www.axug.com/lexington
http://www.axsoup.com
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