SAP APO for Weekly Forecasting

Generally, demand planners forecast at the monthly level since forecasts are well behaved and seasonality is easy to identify in months.

But there are occasions when you may need a very good weekly split of the forecast. This can be achieved through a combination of approaches in APO DP

1. Proportional forecasting
2. Using historical weekly splits as a reference keyfigure or
3. Statistical modeling.

In our upcoming hands-on workshop on May 24, we will be adding a brief session on modeling at the weekly level so that good intra-month splits can be achieved for the purposes of Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling (PPDS).  We will evaluate the usefulness of weekly models to achieve good weekly splits of the monthly forecasts.  What is the incremental value add of this process compared to using the APODPDANT proportioning key figure to derive the splits.

Companies that have been in attendance include Bose, BASF, Novartis, Ghirardelli, Michael Foods, Newell Rubbermaid, Brown-Foreman, Spectrum Brands, and many others.

I look forward to discussing weekly forecasting and modeling with you in a few weeks!