Import historical data for demand forecasts
Tip
This article describes demand forecasting functionality that's built into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. For an even better planning and forecasting experience, we recommend that you try Demand planning in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, which is Microsoft's next-generation collaborative demand planning solution. For details, see the Demand planning home page.
To help guarantee the accuracy of demand forecasts, you must have as much historical demand data as you can get per item or item allocation key. If the historical demand data isn't already imported, use the Historical external demand (ReqDemPlanHistoricalExternalDemandEntity) data entity in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to import it.
In the Data management workspace, you can see an overview of all the fields in the entity.
- Open the Data management workspace.
- Select the Data entities tile.
- Search the entity list for Historical external demand.
- Select Target fields. The following entity fields are mandatory: site (DeliveringSiteId), date (DemandDate), quantity (DemandQuantity), and either item number (ItemNumber) or item allocation key (ProductAllocationKeyId).
To use the data entity, you must have a Microsoft Excel file or comma-separated values (CSV) file that contains the historical demand data. The following example shows how to import the data from a CSV file.
For more information about how to import data, including how to clean up data after an import, see Data import and export jobs overview and its related articles.
Learn more in Generate a statistical baseline forecast.