Planning & Forecasting
Practical guidance on demand planning, sales forecasting, S&OP, production planning, capacity and decision-making.
Articles in This Topic
S&OE vs S&OP: What Each Process Decides and How They Connect
S&OP (sales and operations planning) is the monthly, family-level process that balances demand, supply, and money over a horizon of roughly three to eighteen…
Demand Planning vs Supply Planning: Differences, Handoffs, and Who Owns What
Demand planning estimates what customers will buy and agrees one unconstrained plan across sales, marketing, and finance. Supply planning decides how the company will…
What Is Demand Planning? Definition, Process, and Manufacturing Examples
Demand planning is the cross-functional process of building one agreed forecast of what customers will buy, then using it to drive supply, inventory, and…
Rough Cut Capacity Planning: Method, Formula, and a Worked Example
Rough cut capacity planning (RCCP) checks whether the master production schedule can be built by converting planned volumes into hours of load on a…
Forecast Value Added (FVA): Formula, Example, and Pitfalls
Forecast value added (FVA) measures whether each step of a forecasting process actually improves the forecast, by comparing every step’s error against the step…
Tracking Signal Formula: Calculation, Limits, and a Worked Example
The tracking signal formula is the running sum of forecast errors divided by the mean absolute deviation: TS = RSFE ÷ MAD. The result…
Aggregate Production Planning: Components, Strategies, and Worked Example
The components of aggregate production planning are production rate, workforce level, inventory and backlog, and the output unit you plan in, all set over…
Forecast Bias: Definition, Formula, Examples, and How to Fix It
Forecast bias is the tendency for forecasts to be consistently higher or lower than actual demand. A forecast can be wrong without being biased:…
Sales Forecasting in Manufacturing: Lessons from Dave Garwood
Dave Garwood’s archived RDGarwood articles treated sales forecasting as a management process, not a statistical contest. The recurring idea was practical: create one accountable…
What Is Sales and Operations Planning? A Practical S&OP Guide
Sales and operations planning (S&OP) is a recurring management process that turns demand, supply, product, and financial information into one feasible plan for the…
S&OP vs IBP: Differences, Similarities, and When IBP Adds Value
S&OP and IBP share the same monthly decision cycle; the difference is scope. Sales and operations planning balances demand and supply in units over…
Master Production Schedule: A Practical MPS Guide for Manufacturers
A master production schedule (MPS) states which end items a plant will build, in what quantities, in which weekly periods, over a horizon of…