Using AIM, you can set a forecast for demand on an assembled product. By enabling production demand, the replenishments of the assembled items will become points of demand on components. The date and quantity of this demand is influenced by the Production Duration settings found on your Bill of Materials.

Once you have submitted a forecast with production demand enabled, you will be able to see replenishments listed in the AIM Replenishments tab detailing when components need to be purchased and sub-assemblies need to be assembled. This will show you all the expected replenishments that are required in addition to what is currently booked into Unleashed as open transactions. This is a huge time saving on planning necessary dates and quantities through a supply chain.

Using these suggestions you can choose to book in additional replenishments for a period of time. For example, you may produce a 12 month forecast every week and book in replenishments for the following 4 weeks based on the current calculated stock movement and forecast demand.

Ensure you have the right warehouse selected in the header and set the forecast demand per month by dragging the blue dots up and down in the Demand Forecast Analysis chart. You can open this by clicking ‘Demand’ in the chart toggle selector. You are only able to set forecast demand for future and current months. The past months' forecast will be read-only and can be compared to the actual demand achieved.

Set a strategy for stock holding for your assembled item using the right-hand strategy panel.

The system will calculate replenishments when it calculates that the SOH forecast on a given day is not sufficient for the demand of the following days selected as your ‘min days of stock.’ The ‘max days of stock’ will determine the size of your replenishment.

Calculating production demand

Once you have set a forecast and stock holding strategy, you need to set AIM to calculate demand on components based on the replenishments in this forecast.

In the right-hand panel, enable to link component demand and set a source warehouse for where the production takes place. This will be the warehouse where the components are drawn down in stock in their forecasts. Once finished, Save Forecast using the button in the top right.

Replenishments will then be calculated and appear in the AIM Replenishments tab for your assembled product and each component. Consider setting a stock holding strategy for each component by creating a forecast for each. You can skip the the step of setting demand, unless you plan to add additional sales demand in addition to the automatically calculated production demand.

If a component is shared by multiple assembled products that have forecasts set to link component demand, the forecast of the components will represent the combined demand and allow you to plan across a large number of complexities.

Check out the table below the forecast to see details of the related components and parent assemblies of the open forecast.

Demand forecasting plays a critical role in effective production planning, ensuring that stock levels meet future requirements without overproduction or understocking. In Unleashed, it's essential to understand the relationship between demand forecasting, product modelling, and bill of materials (BOM) configurations, as these elements require distinct manual interventions to work cohesively. This section details how these components interact and clarifies common misconceptions around automatic demand creation.

Selecting product groups during the modelling process does not directly translate into demand being set in the forecasting module. Instead, demand needs to be specified explicitly at the assembled-product level within the Forecasting tool. This ensures that forecasting accurately reflects the production needs of individual assembled products. In other words, while product groups assist in organizing and categorizing items, they do not automatically populate demand figures in the Forecasting report.

While configuring BOM durations is an important step in setting the timing for material requirements, this process does not automatically create demand in the Forecasting report. Once BOM durations are configured, production planning must still be performed separately within each Product Forecast. This manual step connects forecast demand with required replenishments by leveraging the timing information provided by BOM configurations. As a result, users must actively input and manage demand figures within the system to align forecasts with production goals.