Just trying to start a discussion here and see how active the community is.
Are any end-users using the demand forecasting functionality in AX 2012 R3? If so, have you had any luck with it? Is it working as you’ve initially thought it would and providing you the value you wanted? Did you have any unforeseen problems?
I do a bunch of training and webinars in master planning, and I’m always wondering if I should start adding stuff about this functionality or if no one is using it…
Very good initiative. I have no comment on the actual topic, but I have just changed the forum setting to “allow” discussions, rather than only question/answers. Something I changed some time ago in NAV.
So I’ve also just edited the post (and the other)…
Ultimately it is very “light”. In R3 there was talk of workflow that never transpired, but basically you export, point at a data warehouse that stores sales history (and I have been told it only has AX sales history as the source which is difficult to justify for a new implementation despite the customer having 20 years trading history, although I am not sure this is true!) and then use Excel to manipulate and import. The overlaying of elements demand forecasters require, splitting forecasts, handling elements independently etc. they are not there. I would say it has many limitations and when you start to discuss a customers requirements in details you find issues.
Still you can add it, but be aware of the limitations - ultimately if you purchase/make to forecast you need a forecast and this is better than a manual entry (although most I deal with import the end result of a third party demand forecasting tool).
Yeah, I agree. The tool is alright, but there are some limitations and I don’t think it’s quite as easy to use as it may be sold.
As far as only having current ERP data in it, I attended a session at the Technical Conference in 2014 or 2015 or something where a product engineer, Joaquim Rendeiro, demoed populating the staging tables with data from Dynamics AX 2009. in fact, he mentioned that you could feasibly put data from any legacy ERP into the staging tables, providing you were able to get all the required data for the data set.
The link above talks about customizing the framework and the things you can do with the demand forecasting functionality. It’s a pretty interesting slide deck if you haven’t seen it before.