The Demand Planning workspace is your day-to-day operating environment for building, reviewing, and refining the demand plan. It is separate from the Sales Forecasting module but connected to it — pulling in sales forecasts and other intelligence as an overlay while giving you your own tooling to run models, make adjustments, and track accuracy.
2.1 Hierarchy and Demand planning groups
The workspace is fully flexible in how you organize and view the forecast. You can group by:
Group → DC → Product Family → Item (most common default)
Item → DC → Customer (useful when focusing on a specific product across all customers)
Any other combination
The Demand Planning Group is Confido’s concept for grouping similar customers (e.g., by channel) to take advantage of planning at a greater aggregate level. Demand planning groups can be defined under Settings → Demand Planning Groups and will appear in the hierarchy under “Group”.
2.2 Units of Measure and Planning Horizon
The Demand Planning workspace defaults to cases and weeks. However, the workspace is flexible and can be configured to display and edit in units, cases, pounds, or months, depending on your business. Dollar views are also available through the reporting section of demand planning. Planning in dollars is not recommended, as it introduces a translation step from dollars back to volumes and can encourage target-driven rather than demand-driven planning. If you need to reconfigure your workspace, please reach out to your Confido customer success manager.
The planning horizon — how far forward the demand plan extends — is configurable. Most brands set a rolling 12- to 18-month horizon. To set the view that is relevant for your business, click the settings icon and select the fiscal year to display. The business can also determine how to actualize periods. If the business chooses monthly (toggle on “Actualize Periods Monthly”), actuals will only appear at month-end; otherwise, they will appear at the end of each week as partial actuals (toggle off “Actualize Periods Monthly”).
Tip: If your team is held accountable at the period level but plans at the weekly level, you can configure the workspace to show weekly detail by default while also being able to roll up to period view for review meetings and reporting. |
2.3 Demand planning workspace
Once decisions on planning buckets and demand planning groups have been made, the demand planning workspace appears by default as shown below:
Actuals:
Shipment Actuals: Pulled directly from the brand’s ERP
Baselined Actuals: Statistical baseline prediction for each historical planning period
Inventory:
Customer Inventory on Hand (only available at the lowest product level): Customer inventory on hand as pulled from syndicated data
Weeks on hand: Expected weeks on hand based on final forecast values
Suggested order: Suggested positive or negative volume to maintain inventory target levels
Base forecast:
Sales Forecast: Shipment Sales Forecast pulling directly from the Sales Workspace
Selected Statistical forecast: Brand selected statistical forecast
Adjustments:
Opportunities: Opportunities as planned in the sales module (more details refer to section 5. Layering on Sales Intelligence)
General Fixed Adjustment: Any fixed volume adjustments that the demand planner applies on top of the baseline
General Percentage Adjustment: Any % volume adjustments that the demand planner applies on top of the baseline
Final Forecast
Final overwrite: Overrides any previously planned volumes. Any value set here will equal the final forecast.
Final forecast: The sum of base forecast + Adjustments + Suggested Orders. Note that historical values equal the shipment actuals (marked in purple), while the final forecast is marked in green.
If the demand planner toggles on the “base forecast”, promotions, pipefills, and discounts are stripped out of the base and presented as additional adjustment lines. These adjustments are planned directly in the sales module by the trade planners. To trigger a refresh from the sales forecast (as described in section 1.1), promotions, pipefills, and discounts can be synced at the overall level as well as the individual product level (for details, refer to section 5).
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Finally, dedicated forecasts or targets that the brand maintains can be loaded into Confido and used as a reference for the forecast. Most typically, the Annual Operating Plan is loaded as a comparison. To load a forecast, click the “Upload Forecast” button on the top right. You will be asked to give the forecast a name and will be guided through an upload editor that ensures critical fields such as Customer, Product and Dates are present in the upload file.
2.4 Allocation
Forecasts, edits, and model changes can be built at any level of the hierarchy. If you make a change — for instance, running a statistical model at a higher level (e.g., Publix) — Confido apportions the volume down to the underlying items based on their relative shipment volume share over a configurable time horizon. When you make a change at the item level, it rolls back up automatically.
By default, allocations are calculated using a 12-month moving-average lookback. Both the lookback period and the minimum volume thresholds are customizable to fit your business.
If needed, the allocation percentages themselves can be manually overwritten. While not the preferred approach, this gives the user flexibility when the standard logic does not fit the situation. Manual overrides are particularly useful when the demand planner knows that an item is phasing in or phasing out and has more forward-looking insight than the historical shipment volumes can provide. The allocation setting can be found in the demand planning workspace by clicking the third icon from the top.