As explained in our blog post, COVID-19 strongly impacts the demand recorded during this period. The effects may be up or down depending on your business.
Negative effects on forecasts
In the example below there were no sales between March and May 2020.
In this case, and without any specific action, the automatic forecast for the following months is also null.
A function in SKU Science to erase these effects
In order to erase the impact of this period on your future forecasts, we have developed a functionality which can be activated in the interface dedicated to forecasts calculation.
If you activate Take into account COVID-19 option, you will see a new submenu appear.
You can then specify
the start-up period taken into account
the number of periods over which you will apply this function.
In our case we will apply this change over 3 months from March 2020.
Results on your data and forecasts
During the calculation, the platform will then automatically populate the values calculated for the forecast of these periods on the Demand adjustments line of each SKU. This allows data to be closer to what would have happened without COVID-19.
During the same process, a new forecast is calculated based on these values instead of the actual demand or sales values.
We then obtain the following forecast.
You can then adjust each forecast individually, or in aggregate form in the Edit forecast tab.
For example, you can decide to lower all of your July forecasts by 20% for a given customer, a given territory, or a given product class.
This is done in seconds. 🚀