User Ordering Preferences

Overview

User ordering preferences allow each person to individualize the mechanics of their ordering templates and the output. The settings will apply to all the templates you run, so keep this mind when you're making changes.

Template Result Column Order & Inclusion

First - if you've run a template - you'll notice there are over 50 columns of data in the template results displaying different metrics which may or may not be important to you.  If you look below on the right, this is the list of each of these columns.  Here you can select/deselect the checkbox to determine whether or not you want to include that column in the results for your templates or not.   Also you can drag each blue column up or down to re-arrange the order in which they're displayed. This can be super handy to make sure the results you use most appear on your screen without having to scroll

Custom Store Attributes

Custom store attributes are handy because it allows you to associate and name up to five attributes a store may have and have those included in the ordering results.  Just make an Excel sheet with the attributes and the store in the leftmost column and a header row with the attribute name, then select the area and copy and paste it and hit "Save attributes".  An example of a simple custom store attribute list in Excel is shown below.  Simply copy the area and paste!

Note: These are not shared but are unique to each user. If several users will need to use shared attributes, we recommend storing the lists of attributes in a shared Excel file so that they can be easily updated and shared. Each user will need to enter these under their own profile.

Effective Inventory Formula

Depending on your retailer, this gives you 5 different ways to calculate what is considered effective inventory.  Since effective inventory is what is evaluated when determining if an order is needed, you may wish to include things like on order units, plus you may written another order thats not yet in your system - the options can be reviewed by clicking the drop down.

Order Round Up

This allows you to determine what to do in the case where your pack quantity is 12 and the store needs 3.  Do you order 12 or 0?  This setting tells the computer whether and when to round up vs down.

Calculate Next X Weeks Last Year

This option allows you to customize how many weeks in the future to use for the  forward demand analysis.  Since this is as close to forward looking as can be had - whether you want to look one two or four weeks ahead, this gives you the flexibility.

Avg Week Sales Weights

This setting can be helpful in tweaking how the ordering algorithm anticipates demand.  A major component of the demand forecast is based on 1,2,4,8 week avg sales rates as well as the avg sales from the next two weeks based on historical sales.  This setting allows you to weight the averages differently to reduce or enhance the shorter or longer averages.  Examples where this can be helpful - in the beginning of the season, using the 8 week average will understate things because its too backward looking.  Its also not great at the end of the season. To make things easier, we've made several preset weightings you can use. The default is to use a mix of all of them with a slight emphasis on the 2 and 4 week average to give a normalized value.

Detect Spike Sales Distortions

This setting is binary and uses some complex logic whereby if a spike sale is deemed to have occurred and may be affecting the averages, this value will be removed from the average calculations to ignore the distortion and give a more accurate recurrent estimate.