Your production plan is held on Herschel as a list of forecasts and actual requirements. This forecasts on the list are entered and amended using the forecasts tool:
The production plan contains details of which products you need to satisfy demand, on a weekly basis. This demand will normally arise from sales to your customers, but internal demands (for example, for spare parts) can also be put into the forecasts list.
Remember that you do not have to use forecasts. You can run tell Herschel to analyse your sales orders instead, or work from a mixture of sales orders and forecasts.
The production plan for a product for each week consists of a forecast requirement and actual sales requirement for the product. You can enter a weekly forecast for the product into the production plan. As sales requirements for the product are entered in the Sell module, the actual sales figure held on the forecasts list is updated automatically. Note that it is possible to use the production plan's actual sales, forecast sales, or the higher of the forecast and actual sales figures for each week as the basis for the planning process.
The forecasts tool option allows you to quickly delete the forecasts for a range of partnumbers. This is useful for removing old forecasts that are no longer required:
Remember that the only ways to remove actual sales requirements that are past the current date (ie. are late) are to ship the goods, move the duedate of the items in the sales order, or delete the sales order concerned.
If you leave old forecasts on your production plan then Herschel will assume the items are required and will generate all the requirements necessary to produce them. If you are using forecasts to drive the planning process then maintenance of your production plan is essential.
If you use other software to create your forecast demand (for example Excel) then this information can be imported into your production plan using the forecasts tool. The existing forecasts can be overwritten or added to:
