Easy Insight provides a variety of settings and reports to help you forecast your inventory demands. Easy Insight's forecasting is driven by the historical sales velocity of SKUs--for SKU ABC1, how many did you sell in a certain time period? If ABC1 is a SKU that you manufacture, built using 1 BEC2 and 2 DEF3's, it'll appropriately forecast demand for those components as well, and so on through the rest of your bills of materials.
You can configure your forecasting through Inventory -> Configure Inventory for inventory integrations such as Cin7 and Katana, and through Configuration -> Inventory Forecasting for e-commerce integrations such as Shopify and Amazon:
You can customize the date range used for calculating historical product velocity under the Configure Inventory page for your data source, found under the Configuration section. You can also set the minimum days of inventory to keep, the number of days of inventory you want to have on hand after receiving a reorder, and the default lead time in days:
For example, if you set last 365 and last 90 as your intervals, and the average demand per day has been 1.0 units in the last 365 days, and 2.0 units in the last 90 days, the product will show an average demand of 1.5 units / day.
If your connection doesn't have much history in it (for example, a new implementation of an inventory system), you can pull your history from CSV/Excel files or directly from other systems. For more information, see Historical Data in Easy Insight.
For components that go into assembled products, you can specify whether you want to track components at the location of the sold end product (as you might do if you assemble at the store level) or at a central manufacturing location:
You can also choose to exclude locations from your forecasting. For example, if you want to exclude Amazon FBA as a forecasting location but instead forecast at the location that stock starts at before being transferred into FBA, you can configure that behavior here.
You can choose different ways to pull values for lead time:
You might have already set reorder point, reorder quantity, lead time, and safety stock through fields at the product level in your inventory system. If you want to just reference those settings in your forecasting instead of relying on Easy Insight to calculate their values, you can specify the fields to use here:
You can choose whether or not to include returns in the forecast calculations--if included, Easy Insight will subtract the returned quantities from its calculations of sales velocity.
You'll typically find 1 - 4 reports on your connection to help you with forecasting. All integrations include a general forecasting report that goes across all locations:
Within this report, you can filter down to specific reorder or out of stock ranges by clicking on the filters. For example, you can filter the report down to only the SKUs which are currently in need of reorder.
The report itself shows the list of SKUs meeting your filter criteria, the different sale quantities in your configured time periods, the daily demand, the projected out of stock date and remaining days of stock, and the reorder date, days until reorder, and reorder quantity. The current stock for the SKU is shown with on hand and on order. If you click on the Purchases toggle, the report will show the next expected purchase order number, receive date, and quantity.
The 'Configure Forecasting' link on the far right of the report enables you to customize the forecasting for a particular SKU. When you click on this link, a popup window will show the monthly history of that SKU and enable you to change the various forecasting configuration for the SKU. For example, you could customize a particular SKU to have an explicit lead time, keep more stock on hand, set a specific reorder point, and more:
If the connection supports forecasting by location, you'll also have a template that breaks out the forecast by location, enabling you to choose a particular location:
With this report, you'll see the product SKU and name, the different consumed quantities,
With inventory connections that track product suppliers, you can look at items by out of stock and reorder range, grouped up by supplier:
Clicking on any of the cells in these crosstabs will pull up the list of products for that supplier in that reorder or out of stock range.
You can choose to exclude certain orders from your forecasting--for example, if you have a handful of large B2B orders that you want to exclude to keep from throwing off your forecasting. You'll find the 'Forecasting Order Exclusions' report under the Forecasting section of your dashboard. Click on the order ID with the gear icon to exclude or restore an order to your forecasting:
You can choose to exclude certain days from your forecasting--for example, if you want to exclude the week around Black Friday, you can choose to exclude those days from your historical velocity. To exclude days, go to the 'Exclude Forecast Days' section under Account Settings:
The forecast reports also take into account seasonality if configured. You can configure your monthly seasonality values under Account Settings -> Seasonality:
Specify the weight for each month with a value of 1 representing 100% of normal. If you update a month to 1.2, it'll assume 120% of normal demand when calculating values for outofstockdate. You can click Load Historical Quantities to pull in your historical values for help with determining possible month weights.
You can raise a purchase order directly in your inventory system by doing Export -> Generate Purchase Order from the Forecasting reports. You'll need to first select a supplier:
From here, you can choose the products to reorder and the reorder quantities. Upon clicking Create, Easy Insight will generate a draft purchase order and redirect you to the source system to look at the purchase order.
You can customize system specific purchasing settings under the Configure Inventory page as well. Typical settings include default inventory location, purchase order template, and default tax rule.
