New UI for entering demand forecasts to add support for variant code and other improvements

Enabled for	Public preview	General availability
Users, automatically	Mar 1, 2022	Apr 1, 2022

Business value

Accurate demand forecasting gives businesses valuable insight into their position in the market, which helps decision makers shape their strategies for pricing, business growth, and market potential. The ability to include the right level of detail on item variants in demand forecasts unlocks planning capabilities and reduces lead times for companies that don't have an inflow of sales orders and manage many nearly identical items.

Feature details

Item variants are a great way to keep your list of items under control, especially if you have a large number of items that are almost identical and vary only in color, for example. Rather than setting up each variant as a separate item, you can set up one item and then specify the various colors as variants of the item.

You can already register the anticipated demand not only with respect to locations and dates, but with item variants as well in the Demand Forecast Entries page directly or use the Edit in Excel action for bulk editing.

With 2022 release wave 1, you can define the right level of details in the Forecast by Location and Forecast by Variant fields in the Demand Forecast Overview page. Notice that filters by date, locations, items, as well as forecast type are stored in the Demand Forecast Name table. So you can easily stop and continue your work later.

Existing customers must activate the new experience in the Feature Management page: Feature Update: Enable a new user experience for creating demand forecasts. For new customers of Business Central, this experience is enabled by default.

Thank you for your idea

Thank you for submitting this idea. We listened to your idea, along with comments and votes, to help us decide what to add to our product roadmap.

See also

Create a Demand Forecast (docs)