Forecasting and Replenishment Planning

Forecasting takes what each of your variants has actually sold, projects that demand forward week by week, and subtracts it from the stock you hold and the stock already on its way. The result is a date for each variant: the week its stock is projected to run out. From there Qoblex works backwards through your supplier’s lead time to say when a purchase order would have to be placed, and can draft those orders for you.

This article explains where to find the screen, how the three forecast methods differ and where each one is chosen, what every parameter changes, how to read the projection, and how to turn it into draft purchase orders.

Where to find it

Open Forecasting V2 in the main menu. The page itself is titled Forecasting.

Access is controlled by a permission. The menu item is shown to everyone, so if the page refuses to open rather than being absent, ask an administrator to tick View Forecasting on your user record.

Before you start

Three things outside this screen decide what it can tell you.

• Each variant’s forecast method. The method is a property of the variant, not a setting on the forecasting screen. You set it on the variant, under Forecast method, where the choices are Historical Average, Seasonal, and Trend. Every variant starts on Historical Average. The forecasting table shows the method each line used in its Forecast method column, and you can filter by it.
• Sales history. Every method reads the variant’s sales history over the reporting window. A variant with little history there cannot be projected meaningfully, and one with no sales at all in the window does not appear on the screen.
• Supplier data on the variant. Recommended receipts use the supplier’s lead time to work out when an order has to be placed. A variant whose supplier has no lead time still forecasts and still gets a planned line — Qoblex treats the lead time as 0 days rather than refusing to plan, so the line is dated as if the goods arrived the day you ordered them. You can set the lead time on the plan line itself, so a missing one never blocks the plan.

How Qoblex forecasts demand

Qoblex groups the variants on screen by their forecast method and runs each group through its own calculation. All three read the same reporting window, which covers the last three months unless you change the Sales date filter.

Historical Average divides the units the variant moved in the reporting window by the number of weeks in that window, giving a weekly run rate, and holds that rate flat across every projected week.

Seasonal does not use a single average. For each week it is projecting, it looks back to the matching week one year earlier — 364 days, so the weekday alignment holds — and uses what the variant sold in that week. This is the method for stock whose demand has a shape across the year rather than a level.

Trend fits a straight line through the variant’s weekly sales inside the reporting window and reads two numbers off it: Velocity (units/wk), the weekly run rate where the history ends, and Trend (units/wk²), how many units per week that rate is climbing or falling by. Both appear as columns, and both are filled in only on Trend rows. Projecting a trend indefinitely would have a growing product’s demand rise forever, so each further week receives progressively less of the trend, controlled by Trend damping. Only complete weeks are used, because a partial week at either end reads as a dip and tilts the line.

The Growth factor has no effect on variants using the Trend method — Trend derives its own growth from the sales history, so the two would compound. Use the growth factor with Historical Average or Seasonal, and Trend damping with Trend.

Forecast parameters

Click Parameters to open the Forecast options panel. Its Forecasting parameters section holds the settings below. A separate Filters section narrows what is forecast — including the Sales date range that sets the reporting window, and a Location filter that limits the stock and sales the projection is built from.

Choosing Monthly does not change the forecast, only how it is bucketed: Qoblex still forecasts a weekly rate and reports four weeks to a month, so a twelve-month weekly projection becomes twelve monthly rows.

Two more settings belong to the purchasing plan rather than the forecast, so they are not in this panel. Coverage weeks and Supplier strategy appear as their own controls in the toolbar, and only once you turn on Plan purchases.

• Coverage weeks is how many weeks of forecast demand each recommended receipt is sized to cover. It starts at 12.
• Supplier strategy is how Qoblex picks the starting supplier for each planned line — Quickest, Cheapest, or Preferred.

Reading the projection

Each row is one variant. Alongside the identifying columns (product, SKU, barcode, brand, product type, supplier) the table reports what the variant has done and what it is expected to do — the quantities sold, returned, and cancelled in the window, the forecast quantity per period, forecast sales and margin, stock on hand, and incoming stock.

The projection works forward one period at a time. Qoblex starts from the stock you hold today, adds the stock arriving in that period from open purchase orders, subtracts the forecast demand, and carries the balance into the next period. The first period whose closing balance falls below zero is the variant’s projected shortage.

On a Seasonal row, a projected period is marked Insufficient history — an amber marker in the cell — when the matching week a year earlier falls before the variant’s first ever sale. There was no reference week to copy, so that period was forecast as zero. Historical Average and Trend rows never carry the marker.

Opening a variant’s chart shows the same calculation as layers: Historical sales, Forecast demand, Projected stock, Incoming purchases, and Projected purchases, with Historical stockout periods shaded behind them — the layer that shows why Exclude stockout days matters for that variant. The chart also marks the First projected shortage. Above it sit three summary figures: Forecast Quantity, Stock on hand, and Recommended receipts, which shows the receipt the plan proposes for this variant.

Planning purchases from the forecast

Where a variant is projected to run short, Qoblex proposes a receipt to cover it: enough to close the projected shortfall, plus your Coverage weeks of forecast demand on top, dated by working backwards from the shortage through the supplier’s lead time. Variants that are never projected to run short get no proposal.

The supplier on each line is the one your Supplier strategy picked. Lines whose variant has no supplier or no lead time are flagged so you can see which dates rest on a default rather than on a real lead time. A missing purchase price is flagged only when your strategy is Cheapest, since that is the only strategy that reads cost.

Turning on Plan purchases adds editable columns so you can overrule the recommendation before it becomes an order:

• the supplier — changing it fills that line’s Lead Time from the supplier’s record;
• the Lead Time — pre-filled from the supplier, or 0 when the supplier has none, and editable on every line. Changing it recalculates the line’s Receipt Date, a read-only column that is not carried onto the created order;
• the Quantity To Receive and the line’s Coverage weeks, which are two sides of the same number — edit either and Qoblex recomputes the other.

A reset control on the row puts a line back to the figures Qoblex calculated.

Review purchases previews the orders that will be created, grouped by supplier, before anything is written. You must choose a receiving location for each order — Qoblex will not create them until you do.

Troubleshooting