Demand Planning

Spot products about to run out from their sales velocity, and turn each restock alert into a work order or purchase order.

Demand Planning tells you which products are about to run out and how much of each to make. By looking at how fast each product has sold over the window you configure, together with its reorder point, lead time and safety stock days, Eleo generates production recommendations that help you avoid overproduction and stockouts.

A meat pie bakery that sells around 400 pies a day and needs two days to bake a batch shouldn’t discover it is out on the morning of the rush. Demand Planning watches how fast the pies are moving and tells you when to start baking and how many — before you run out or waste ingredients on pies nobody buys.

How demand planning works

Every recommendation is worked out per product from four inputs:

• Sales velocity — Your average daily sales over the velocity window you set (default 30 days), plus a 7-day trend so you can see whether sales are picking up or slowing down. If you have sold 600 bottles of zobo in the last 30 days, your velocity is 20 a day.
• Reorder point — The stock level that triggers an alert. With the Auto (Sales Velocity) method it is velocity × (lead time + safety stock days), so it rises and falls with your sales. With the Manual method it is a fixed number you set.
• Current stock — Available stock is checked against the reorder point. Once it drops to or below that point, the product appears on the dashboard with a suggested quantity that brings you back up to the reorder point plus what you will sell while the next batch is being made. If your reorder point is 60 bottles, you have 30 in stock and you sell 20 a day with a 2-day lead time, Eleo suggests making 70.
• Lead time and safety stock — Lead time is how many days it takes to produce or receive the product; safety stock is the extra days of cover you want on top. If zobo takes 3 days to brew and you keep 1 day of safety stock, the alert fires while you still have about 4 days of sales on the shelf — early enough to start the next batch.

Working the dashboard

1. 1

   Navigate to Demand Planning

   Go to Production → Demand Planning. The dashboard shows how many alerts are Critical and Warning, how many produced products are still Unconfigured, and the full list of restock alerts.

2. 2

   Configure each product

   Click Restock Settings and add a config for every product you want watched: the restock method (Auto or Manual), a manual reorder point if you chose Manual, lead time, safety stock days, the velocity window, and — for products you make in-house — the preferred recipe. A product with no config never raises an alert; the Unconfigured count tells you how many are still missing.

3. 3

   Review the alerts

   Each alert shows the product, its urgency, current stock, reorder point, daily velocity with its trend, days of stock remaining and the suggested quantity, sorted with the least runway first. Critical means stock will run out before the lead time elapses, Warning means you have less than two lead times left, and Info means you have crossed the reorder point but still have some room. Click a row to open the product.

4. 4

   Act on an alert

   For a produced product, click Create WO. Eleo creates a Planned work order from the preferred recipe for the suggested quantity, due when the lead time runs out, and opens it for you; it also appears on the production schedule. If no preferred recipe is set you are sent to Restock Settings to add one first. For a sourced product, click Create PO to open a draft purchase order with the product and suggested quantity pre-filled.

Tuning the recommendations

Suggested quantities are recommendations, not fixed plans. The levers for changing them live in each product’s restock config:

• Velocity window — A 7-day window reacts quickly to a change in sales; a 30-day window smooths out a quiet week. Shorten it when demand is shifting, lengthen it when it is steady.
• Safety stock days — Raise this for products you never want to run out of. A restaurant that must always have its signature pepper sauce can add a few days of buffer so the alert fires, and the suggested quantity grows, well before stock hits zero.
• Manual reorder point — Switch a product to Manual when you know better than the sales history — a public holiday you expect to be slow, or a promotion you expect to be busy — and set the threshold yourself.