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A supplier forecast tells one supplier what you expect to need from them over a period, so they can prepare. It is a courtesy and a planning aid — not an order, and not a commitment to buy.

Where to find it: Supplier Forecasts in the Demand Planning section of the main menu, or step 5 of the Planning Cycle.

Where forecasts come from

There is one route: an approved procurement plan. On the plan, the Supplier forecasts card — “One forecast per supplier, to send them what you expect to order.” — and its Generate Supplier Forecasts button. The same action is step 5 of the Planning Cycle, as Generate supplier forecasts.

What you get:

• One draft forecast per supplier on that plan.
• The whole horizon, week by week. A forecast covers the production plan’s whole horizon, not the procurement plan’s thirty days, and its rows are weeks running Monday to Sunday. Quantities are given to three decimal places.
• Each line says what it is. The weeks this plan is actually buying for are marked Planned order; the production beyond them is marked Forecast, not an order. The later weeks are netted against stock, open orders and the planned orders, earliest need first, so the supplier is not told to expect something you have already bought.
• Notes recording where it came from: “Auto-generated from procurement plan PR-P1000004”.

This replaced a forecast that told the supplier almost nothing. Earlier releases repeated the plan’s thirty days of purchases and spread them across calendar months by their share of the days, so 2,000 L needed on one day in September went out as 774.19 L in September and 1,225.81 L in October — and the six months of production behind them were never mentioned at all.

The procurement plan has to be approved (or further on). On a draft the button is disabled and reads “Approve the procurement plan before generating supplier forecasts.” A second press answers “Supplier forecasts are already being generated for this plan.”. The other refusals name what is actually wrong rather than repeating “approve it first”:

An empty procurement plan is not by itself a reason to refuse. An approved plan that buys nothing but has a production plan in force behind it still generates: the next 30 days are covered, but months two to six are not, and that is exactly what the supplier needs to hear. Only when the horizon behind the plan needs nothing either is there nothing to send — and that is not a failure. The run finishes, step 5 reads done, and the plan records “No supplier forecasts needed: everything the production plan needs is already covered” in its Notes.

The button itself is disabled with the same reason beside it, so it and the server always agree. See Running your weekly planning cycle for every reason a Generate step can fail.

The “generate one forecast by hand” screen has been retired. It built a supplier’s forecast from the site’s latest forecast of sales, which is a forecast of what you sell rather than of what you buy, so its lines were usually zero and it sat outside any planning cycle. Forecasts now come from the procurement plan, which is the thing that actually knows what you are going to order. Forecasts made that way in the past can still be opened, exported and archived; there is simply no way to make another.

Quick start

1. Approve a procurement plan.
2. Press Generate Supplier Forecasts on it. One draft appears per supplier.
3. Open each draft and check the quantities, and the Variance % against what you last told them.
4. Press Approve — on the forecast, or straight from the list.
5. Export it and send it to the supplier however you normally do, then press Mark Sent to Supplier.

The list

Columns are Supplier, Period Start, Period End, Status and Created. There is no New button, because forecasts are generated rather than entered.

Every column filters, and every filter reaches the server. The Supplier box narrows the list to one supplier by name — the fastest way to answer “what have we told Dairyland?” — Status is a pick-list of draft, approved, sent and archived, and the three date columns take a day. Sorting a column and turning a page work the same way: the server is asked for the matching forecasts, so a match on page four is still found.

• Approve is available as a row action on a draft, so a week’s forecasts can be approved without opening each one. It asks first: “Approve the forecast for Dairyland Ingredients? It can then be sent to the supplier.” The action appears only on rows where it is allowed.
• Arriving from the Planning Cycle’s Review supplier forecasts, the list is filtered to that plan and shows a chip reading “From procurement plan PR-…”. Use the × on the chip to see every forecast again.

Reading a forecast

The header names the Supplier, the Period, the Status and when it was Generated. Notes say where it came from, and carry any refusal — for example a product whose quantity could not be put into the supplier’s unit.

Variance is coloured to be scanned: green up to 10%, amber above that to 20%, and bold red beyond 20%.

Quantities are in the supplier’s unit

A supplier who sells by the pallet plans in pallets. So each line is converted into their order unit rather than your stock unit — 1.5 pallets, not 1,350 kg.

• Nothing is rounded up. A forecast is not an order, so quantities stay fractional, to three decimal places. A genuine need is never shown as zero, however small it is against a pallet.
• The unit is decided once per product, from the total, and then shared across the weeks. Converting week by week would leave a light week in kilograms beside heavy weeks in tonnes — and a week under half a kilogram would be refused outright.
• A quantity that cannot be converted stays in your stock unit, and the forecast’s Notes say which product and why. It is never silently relabelled. To fix it, add the conversion on the product, or check the supplier’s pack size.
• Set the supplier’s unit, pack size, cost and minimum on the supplier’s Products tab — see Preparing products and suppliers for planning.

Previous Qty and Variance %

Previous Qty is what this supplier was actually told last time — taken from their most recent approved or sent forecast for the same site, matched on the same product, the same week, the same unit and pack, and the same basis.

• Drafts are not used. An unsent draft was never a promise, so it is no baseline to compare against.
• Another site’s forecast is not used. That is a different supply picture, not a previous version of this one.
• A forecast in a different unit is not used. A previous figure in kilograms is no comparison for one in pallets.
• Archived forecasts are never used as the comparison. Archiving is how you take a forecast out of that history.
• A planned order is not compared against a forecast. Telling a supplier “you will get an order for this” and “we expect to need this” are different statements, so the two bases are compared only with their own kind.
• Variance % is only worked out where there is a previous figure. Both columns show “-” otherwise — on screen and in the PDF the supplier receives.

The first forecast a supplier ever gets is therefore all dashes, which is correct: you had told them nothing. So is the first weekly forecast after this release, even for a supplier you have told things for months: the previous forecasts covered calendar months, and a month is no comparison for a week. Normal service resumes with the run after it.

The lifecycle

Mark Sent to Supplier is honest about what it does: it records that you sent the forecast, and nothing else. QTRACA does not email, transmit or deliver anything to the supplier, then or later. Export it and send it your own way — email, portal, whatever you use — and then mark it, so the record matches what happened. A forecast has to be approved first — otherwise the answer is “Cannot mark as sent — forecast must be approved first”.

Archive is offered on a draft, an approved forecast and a sent one. It asks first:

Archive supplier forecast
“Archive this forecast? An archived forecast is never used as the comparison for later ones.”
Buttons: Archive / Cancel

That second sentence is the reason to think before archiving a sent forecast: it is what the supplier was told, and archiving it removes it from the comparison the next forecast makes.

Exporting

Export offers three formats:

• PDF - Summary, for a supplier who wants the headline volumes: one row per product, with Total Qty, UOM and Total Est. Cost.
• PDF - Detailed, with the full week-by-week breakdown including Previous Qty and Variance %.
• CSV, for a supplier who wants to load it into their own planning.

Both PDFs finish with Total Lines, Total Forecast Qty and Total Estimated Cost. The quantity total is given per unit — “2.5 pallet (PAL900); 120 kg” — because adding pallets to kilograms would produce a number that means nothing.

Exporting does not change the status, so you can take a copy of a draft to check before approving it.

When a product has no supplier

A forecast is sent to a supplier, so a procurement line with no supplier cannot produce one. Rather than quietly dropping those products, generation names them:

“No supplier is set up for MILK and SUGAR. Add the product to a supplier before generating forecasts.”

Forecasts for the suppliers that are set up are still created. The Planning Cycle shows the same thing as a critical blocker — “N products have no supplier”, with “Supplier forecasts cannot include MILK. Add it to a supplier.”

To fix it: add the product to a supplier’s Products tab, filling in Unit Cost, Lead Time (Days) and Minimum Order Qty, and generate again. There is no way round it from this screen — a forecast with no supplier has nobody to send it to.

Generating again

Pressing Generate Supplier Forecasts a second time on the same procurement plan replaces what has not been acted on:

• That supplier’s earlier draft from this plan is archived, and a fresh draft takes its place. You do not end up approving one of two near-identical drafts.
• Once any forecast from this plan has been approved or sent, generating is refused altogether — “Supplier forecasts from this plan are already approved for Dairyland Ingredients. Archive them to generate again.” A new draft sitting beside what the supplier has already been told is exactly the confusion the refusal exists to prevent. To regenerate anyway, open the approved or sent forecast and Archive it first; be sure you mean to, because archiving also takes it out of the Previous Qty comparison.
• If building the new forecast fails part way, the earlier draft is left exactly as it was.

A cycle’s step 5 counts as done once no draft is left for the plan — every forecast approved or sent. That is why a stray draft keeps the cycle from completing.

Availability and permissions

• Part of the Demand Planning module, which requires Manufacturing and Orders. See Getting started with Demand Planning.
• Forecasts are scoped to your current site, and so is the comparison with previous ones.
• A site is not a security boundary. The site selector decides which site’s supplier forecasts you are looking at and working on, and it keeps another site’s out of your way. It is a working scope, not a wall: a user who can open this screen and change site can read that site’s figures. The real boundary is the account — nothing belonging to another account is reachable at all. Do not use sites to keep figures from a colleague; use roles.
• Viewing is open to administrators, production managers and users, QA managers, demand planners and procurement planners.
• Approving, marking sent, archiving and generating need an administrator, production manager or procurement planner.
• Generate procurement plans must be on in Forecast Settings: with it off there is no procurement plan to generate forecasts from, and the Planning Cycle says so.

Things to know

• A forecast is not an order. Nothing is committed and no purchase order is created. To actually buy, use Create purchase orders on the procurement plan.
• Only drafts can be edited or deleted. Once approved, the figures are fixed so that what you sent stays on record.
• Quantities can legitimately be zero in a week where nothing is expected. A row of zeroes is still information for the supplier.
• A forecast covers the production plan’s whole horizon, week by week — not just the thirty days the procurement plan is buying for. The near weeks are marked Planned order and the rest Forecast, not an order, so the supplier can tell a commitment from an expectation.
• Weeks close Monday to Sunday, in your account’s time zone, which is also how the Previous Qty comparison lines two forecasts up.
• Review supplier forecasts on the Planning Cycle filters the list to that cycle’s plan. Clearing the chip shows everything, including older forecasts for other plans.
• Forecasts made through the retired manual route still open, export and archive. They belong to no planning cycle, so they never appear as a cycle’s step 5.