Overview
AGR offers the option to smooth down promotional sales to create more accurate forecasts.
This is a great option for Items influenced by historical promotional sales, by minimizing the impact of past promotions on future demand estimates. By default, promotional smoothing is disabled in AGR.
How it works
Promotional smoothing is a part of forecasting in AGR and uses sales periods preceding promotions to estimate how sales might have been without the promotional influence. We then override the promotional sales period with the regular sales forecast, finetuning the input that goes into the forecast calculations. Resulting in a more accurate forecast reflecting regular demand going forward.
AGR relies on information from the ERP system to identify past promotional periods for each item, enabling the automatic application of promotional smoothing.
Examples
1) As soon as you enable promotional smoothing for an item that has a past promotions, AGR will calculate the potential regular sales for that period and use as input in the forecast calculations.
Promotional smoothing takes into account any changes made to the forecast or adjustments made to sales before the promotion period.
2) The user has adjusted past sales information. Promotional smoothing immediately takes this change into account.
Keep in mind
Here are some things you might want to consider when working with promotional smoothing.
Smoothed data is not saved when promotional smoothing is disabled after a period of it being enabled, but will be recalculated if smoothing is enabled later.
AGR will calculate each smoothed period individually for items that have repeated promotions. The smoothed data from previous promotional periods will feed into calculation of the next promotional period to forecast sales over the promotional period.
AGR uses the sales data from the First Sale Date into Forecast through the last sales period preceding each promotional period for forecasting.
Enabling promotional smoothing
Promotional smoothing can be enabled globally in the Settings area of AGR. Use the Item Card Details to enable or disable promotional smoothing for individual items.
It is important to note that this also requires the availability of data on past promotional periods to have any impact.
In settings
Promotional smoothing can be enabled for your entire inventory by going to
the Forecast tab
Promotional Smoothing by scrolling down
In the item card
You can enable promotional smoothing in one of two ways in the Item card.
The Item card details tab in the card
2. The info sidebar of the item card
