The Demand Forecast is a window in Enterprise Explorer used for viewing, changing and working collaboratively with the forecast in the Demand Plan Server. To be able to work with the forecast, the forecast flow needs to be published to the logged on user, and this is done in the Publish Forecast window. The published flows will continue to be published to the user until they are removed. The publishing can be done for both parts and groups. There are three different access levels for the publishing:
Publishing of a group can be done with the setting Include Parts which indicates that all the included flows of that group will be published dynamically to the user. This means when new parts are added or old parts are removed, they will automatically appear or disappear in the Demand Forecast window. The Include Parts functionality reduces the need for handling the publishing of parts. The published forecast also have to be in status Released or Reviewed. This is to prevent that the forecast is changed in the Demand Forecast window before it is ready. Releasing the forecast is done from the Demand Plan Client by a demand planner. The flows can have three different statuses:
The forecast can be created either in the Locked or Released status when the Create Forecast job is executed. If Create in Release check box is selected, the forecast part status will be set to Released when the forecast is created. It is possible to decide on the forecast part if the status should change from Released to Reviewed as soon as a user has looked at the specific forecast part in the Demand Forecast window, and if this option is not selected the user has to actively change the status. The statuses can be used to create a simple work flow for adjusting the forecast. All forecasts can be seen regardless of the status in the Demand Plan Client and the statuses can be changed. The status on a group is the aggregate forecast for all included flows with priority Locked, Released and Reviewed. For example, if a group has two flows, one in Locked status and the other in Reviewed status, the group status will be Locked. If the status is changed to Released on the group level, all the included flows will have the status Released.