Forecasting on the Basis of Customer and Ship To w Smoothie

In a previous video we described the power of attribute based forecasting in the Demand Works product called Smoothie. Attributes allow for flexible hierarchies or more accurately in Smoothie, attribute sequences to be created for the purposes of aggregate forecasting, reporting, or simply organization and identification. Attributes are very easily setup in Smoothie and can be setup for any item for which a coding of some type can be applied to a SKU. While using this functionality we have been thinking how valuable it would be to use either customers or ship tos as attributes. This would allow both aggregated forecasting and reporting to be based upon the customer or ship to. This fits neatly into the a growing trend that companies have to perform planning in a differentiated way based upon either a customer or a defined service level. This is generally referred to as service level based planning.