Are anyone familiar with Demand Planner ? Can you give a short presentation here? What is it good for? What type of products does it replace? I know the are comming with a integration to i.e. Navision, but I need to know more about it first.
Hi Erik, You can download this solution and a whitepaper from partnersource portal (Navision Product downloads)
Any info for end users who do not have access to the partner source portal. I just sat through the web demo from Microsoft, and it looks promising. Has anyone implemented it yet ? David
We just had a demo of the demand planner… The demand planner has its own SQL database and a configuration utility that lets you specify the data you want to extract from your ERP system (Navision, Axapta or Great Plains) to the DP database. In the demo we saw the customers, items and sales history were uploaded from Axapta. There is also a client application that allows you to group your items and customers into hierachical product and market groups and then apply a variety of algorithms to extrapolate demand into the future. The demand can then be uploaded back to the ERP system. In Navision, the upload is to the production forecast table, I’m not sure .about Axapta and Great Plains. The window in the demand planner client app is similar to the Navision trendscape form. It displays the item and customer group in in rows and the time “buckets” in columns. There is also a feature that allows the distribution of demand forecasts via Excel to colleagues for editing before uploading back to the ERP system.
A quick word of caution - it is expensive. And because it is a tool kit and not a boxed solution the implementation costs are likely to be high in relation to the software.
We have successfully customized a demo of Demand Planner for a customer. We were able to 1. Extract items, sales and customers information from their Navision 3.70 database, 2. Import the information into Demand Planner for analysis, 3. Setup indicators/worksheet templates to allow the customers to use the various algorithms to forecast the future demands based on historical demands. Both interactive and massive forecasting was used. 4. Re-synchronise this forecast back to Navision, 5. Ran the codeunit provided to import the forecasted quantities into the production forecast entry table. 6. Using the requisition worksheet->calculate plan function, we were able to generate the required purchase orders from the forecasted quantities. It is a bit of a learning curve.
quote:
A quick word of caution - it is expensive. And because it is a tool kit and not a boxed solution the implementation costs are likely to be high in relation to the software.
Originally posted by Adam Seaton - 2004 Jun 18 : 15:07:10
We now implemented this. I my opinion it is both sold at a very good price AND easy to install. It is not a tool kit, and if you look away from the many technical issues we had, which you always have when you install a Microsoft beta (I know THEY called it version 1.1 or so, but still), then it only took a few days to install and setup.
Any idea if it is possible to customize demand planner? will the navision developer license allow it?