Overview
This article will walk your through when to use different workflows for generating inventory.
Reporting Act vs Plan
When you are reviewing a report that will be hind sighting how your actual performed against your plan, you will want to have your scenario settings setup like this.
Actualize Scenario should be disabled, Auto Generate Inventory should be disabled especially when you want to see what the planned inventory for future weeks based on the last time you updated your plans. If the Auto Generate Inventory is enabled in other views that is fine as you can always manually run Generate Inventory through the context menu to see what the planned inventory was supposed to be. With this set up it will calculate the inventory from the first week selected in the views for the plan variant.
This setup will allow you to have Act and Plan variants in the same view to compare performance.
EXAMPLE:
Reporting Act vs Plan across history and future time periods
When you are reviewing a report that will be covering actual and plan time periods (Last 4 Weeks, Last Week, This Week, Next 4 Weeks) you will want to have your scenario settings setup like this.
Once you make a change the inventory will auto calculate. However, the BOP Inventory Plan is not how you actualized your inventory, so all forward Inventory KPI's and EOP will be based on a plan which really would not give you an indication of where your inventory would be and how you will be turning. In order, to correct this behavior when Auto Generate Inventory is enabled it will always calculate your Next BOP off of the current weeks actual BOP. EOP will remain a calculation and you will see a variance in that first week. This should help prevent any misreading of inventory that could cause you to overbuy or underbuy. Toolio always recommends to have your Actualize Scenario on to get the accurate forward looking inventory plans.
EXAMPLE:
EXAMPLE 2:
Planning Workflows based on Act/Plan
When working in your planning workflows we recommend having Actualize Scenario enabled. If you need to compare to previous plans, use scenarios and snapshots for that.
When building your forward forecasts in season, have Actualize Scenario enabled to have the most up to date trends to guide you on any changes needed to future time periods. Auto Generate Inventory enabled will ensure that your inventory is updating from the current inventory data based on your feed configuration.
Planning Workflows where you need to enter plans in for historic time periods
When you need to input your plans from the beginning of the year you should have this setup.
This will allow you to enter in plans for past timeframes. Then you can manually run the Generate Inventory context menu starting at any week you want. We recommend doing this in a separate scenario so you don't override any current plans.
