Collaboration: Overview & Layout

Collaboration: Overview & Layout

This article is part of the Collaboration series, split from the original Collaboration article.

Collaboration Overview

Traditionally, planners spend most of their time in our enterprise equivalent module or workbench, a collaboration module to be used as a tool to edit the forecast and come to a consensus unconstrained demand plan. Collaboration provides a structured framework for Sales, Marketing, and other stakeholders to add their business intelligence to your plan.

Use Collaboration to: 

  1. View and edit Demand Types for any filter combination of Items, Locations, or Customers
  2. Review and modify the plan based on special knowledge
  3. Make changes to editable Demand Types and publish your plan

Collaboration Layout

The chart reflects the data in the grid and is interactive. The blue line reflects the current period or the planning start date.

The tree located on the left of the screen is a flexible, hierarchical structure to organize the domain related attributes and select what data gets displayed in the grid. Clicking on the tree will show how the attributes are organized. A user can easily pivot the data by dragging and dropping the attributes.

Users can use the filter to focus on the data that they're interested in. When clicking apply and save, the tree updates based on the filter selection.

A red flag indicates an item is an exception. Clicking on the tree will load data in the grid and chart demand types or quantitative rows in the grid. Sales history and sales orders provide visibility to actual demand.

Statistical forecasts with events combine the event forecast from the lifecycle manager with a machine learning pyramid forecast and serves as a starting point for collaboration.

Additional inputs like sales forecasts can be configured and assigned to collaborators to capture their insights and work towards the demand plan. For most organizations, we recommend starting with only one or two levels of collaboration or demand types. Experience has shown that starting with more becomes difficult to manage and does not result in a more accurate plan.



 



Collaboration series