If your business is a combination of wholesale and retail, you might find it difficult to accurately forecast sales based on the combined sales history. Let's look at an example:
You sell 100 units of a product per month through your retail channel and have a wholesale order of 600 units every 3 months. On average you sell 300 units a month.
- Average per month = (3*100+600)/3 = 300 units
When replenishing merchandise for the next month, you need either 100 units or 700 units depending on whether you'll have a wholesale order during that month. The average forecast would recommend to you to purchase 200 units.
To make the forecast more accurate, Demand Planner allows you to plan wholesale orders separately from retail orders.
Enabling wholesale planning
To enable wholesale planning, go to Account > Settings.
Within Settings, go to the Forecast tab and 'Enable forecasting for wholesale customers', then click Save.
Wholesale demand planning
Once wholesale forecasting is enabled, you will find a 'Wholesale order' menu icon on the left-hand navigation panel. From this screen, you can add new wholesale orders.
When you creating a wholesale order, you can specify the following:
- Expected date of this order
- Source warehouse
- Frequency
Once this wholesale order is saved, Demand Planner will consider this customer to be a wholesale customer and will treat their past purchases separately from retail orders. It will also change the forecast for this variant.
Prior to excluding wholesale orders:
Post excluding wholesale orders:
Projections now show wholesale orders separately; see the red dots in the above forecast.
Wholesale orders are taken into account in replenishment reporting based on the expected date.
