One of the most powerful aspects of Confido’s Demand Planning module is that it lives in the same system as the Sales Forecasting and TPM modules. This means sales intelligence — promotions, new distribution, pipe fills, opportunities — flows through automatically into the “adjustment layers”, rather than needing to be manually communicated or re-entered.
5.1 What Flows Through Automatically
When you are viewing a customer in the Demand Planning workspace, you will see the following clearly broken out as separate rows below the base forecast:
Promotions: Incremental volume from promotions the sales team has entered in the TPM module, with the timing, lift percentage, and product detail visible. You can click into any promotion row to see which promotion is driving it and what assumptions the sales team made.
New distribution / pipe fills: When a salesperson confirms new distribution or enters a distribution opportunity, the associated pipe fill (load-in quantity for initial inventory fill) appears as its own row on the demand plan, clearly labeled with the retailer and timing.
Discounts: Incremental volume from discounts the sales team has entered in the TPM module. You can click into any discount row to see which assumptions the sales team made.
Opportunities: Volume from opportunities that have not yet been confirmed. These are toggleable — you can choose whether to include them, exclude them, or include them weighted by their likelihood percentage.
For Opportunities specifically, the demand planner has the option to include opportunities above a certain likelihood threshold. This can be especially helpful in scenario planning. To include only opportunities with a specific likelihood, go to Settings in the demand planning workspace → General Settings → Opportunity Settings.
5.2 Adjusting Sales Intelligence in the Demand Plan
You are not locked into the sales team’s assumptions. As a demand planner, you can:
Toggle individual promotions, pipefills, discounts, or opportunities on or off (through the baseline toggle) in the demand plan at any level, or add additional volume assumptions
Accept or reject specific overlays at any level of the hierarchy
All adjustments you make can be tracked with a comment history. You can leave a note alongside any change — for example, “Reduced lift from 80% to 50% based on recent Publix BOGO performance at this price point” — so there is a clear audit trail of why the demand plan differs from the sales forecast. To insert a comment, right-click in the cell → Comment → Enter your comment (refer to section 7.2 for details).
5.3 Controlling the Sales Intelligence Sync
By default, sales intelligence flows through from the Sales Forecasting module via triggers from the demand planner — specifically, by “syncing the sales forecast” (refer to section 1.1). This puts the demand planner in control of which sales version to leverage as the basis for the demand plan (if applicable). This is especially important if you run a strict S&OP cycle in which input data needs to be “locked-in” on particular dates of the month (e.g., Workday 4 for marketing input). Confido gives you full control over the sync, as described in section 1.1:
You can sync all sales intelligence at any time with a single action to get the latest view
You can turn off the automatic sync as you approach a lock, so no surprise changes come through
You can resync selectively — for example, accepting a change the sales team made to one specific customer or item without pulling in everything else
Confido provides additional features. For instance, if new opportunities, promotions, or pipefills are entered by the sales team during the planning period, Confido flags them (with a blue triangle) and asks the demand planner whether to adopt them.
Note: Lock the sales intelligence sync before finalizing the demand plan for a period. This ensures that last-minute changes by the sales team do not alter a forecast that the supply chain team is already acting on. You can always resync a specific item individually if a legitimate change needs to be incorporated. |
5.4 Demand Planning Bulk Uploader
For teams who need to load promotions, discounts, opportunities, and adjustments into Demand Planning in bulk rather than one at a time in the workspace UI, Confido offers a Bulk Uploader template. The bulk uploader can be easily created and includes the following fields:
Demand Planning Group - load at this level for changes that apply broadly across a group of customers.
Customer - load here for customer-specific changes.
Product Family - classify the Adjustment Type when loading at this level.
Adjustment Type - Promotion, Discount, Opportunity, General Fixed Adjustment, or General Percentage Adjustment.
Period columns - one column per period (week or month) of the value you're loading.
Note: Blank cell = zero, not "no change": A blank cell in a week column loads as zero and overwrites any existing value for that week. If you only want to update some weeks, remove those columns/rows from your upload - don't leave them blank. Percentage adjustments are entered as decimals: 10% = 0.10, 25% = 0.25, 50% = 0.50. Entering "100" is read as 10,000%, not 100%. |
Choosing a load level and how disaggregation works
Promotions, discounts, and pipefills are usually customer- and product-family-specific, so most teams load those at the Customer + Product Family level. General fixed/percentage adjustments (e.g. an across-the-board correction) can be loaded at the broader Demand Planning Group level.
When you load above the item level, Confido automatically disaggregates the value down to underlying items using your account's configured allocation lookback period (default: 12 weeks) - the same allocation logic used for manual adjustments in the workspace. Example: a 100-unit fixed adjustment loaded at Customer + Product Family splits across that family's items in proportion to their recent volume share.
This uploader is a bridge tool, not a permanent home for this data - the long-term workflow is entering these directly in the Sales module with automatic sync into Demand Planning.