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:
(Demand planning) Group → DC → Product Family → Item
Item → DC → Customer (useful when focusing on a specific product across all customers)
Any other combination (incl. the use of custom attributes refer to help section: “How to Define Custom Field Rules”)
The planning hierarchy is set at time of onboarding. Any change to the hierarchy post onboarding will have an impact on how data is aggregated and statistics run. Thus, it is recommended to generally stick with the set hierarchy and review at most annually.
Confido allows for two different views at the product level. Either with the internal item number in the product name or without. To select your preferred choice, go to Settings in the Demand workspace → Toggle on “Include Internal Item Number in product Name” under Display.
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 is flexible to be set up in terms of units of measure (cases vs units) and planning buckets (weekly vs monthly). 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
Actuals:
Shipment Actuals: Pulled directly from the brand’s ERP
Baselined Actuals: Statistical baseline prediction for each historical planning period
Inventory (if Muffin is part of your package):
Customer Inventory on Hand (only available at the lowest product level): Customer DC inventory on hand as pulled from Muffin
Weeks on hand: Expected weeks on hand based on final forecast values
Suggested order: Suggested positive or negative volume to maintain DC inventory target levels
Base forecast:
Sales Forecast: Shipment Sales Forecast pulling directly from the Sales Workspace
Selected Statistical forecast: Based on selected statistical forecast method.
Adjustments:
Promotions, pipefills, and discounts are stripped out of the sales forecast and presented as additional adjustment lines. NB: 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). 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 the “base forecast” option off, promotions, pipefills, and discounts are included in the sales forecast immediately, and the statistical forecast is run on the shipment actuals rather than the baselined actuals.
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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.
