Long Term Planning

Efficiently build a demand plan spanning years with Claret's Long Term Planning tool. Customize your layout, manage your plans at any hierarchy level, and reconcile data seamlessly.

he objective of Long Term Planning is to efficiently build out a demand plan that spans years. This demand plan can become your budget or your latest quarterly estimate. The tool allows you to be at any level in your Item and Customer Group hierarchy and enter in your Long Term Demand plans. Regardless of what level you enter your data at, it will find its way to the lowest Item @ Customer Group level via reconciliation.

Initial page configuration

The first time you come to Long Term Planning, you'll need to configure the layout - the columns of data you wish to see to manage your long term plans and the level at which you wish to plan. The next set of steps walks you through just how to do that. Here we are creating our first Long Term Planning view.

For an overview of how Views work within Claret, see Managing Views

1. Select the views button in the top-right of the page and click on it.

The View menu

1. Click on "Configure". You will then see the modal which allows you to configure your view. You may need to select to 'Add' a new view at this point.

Selecting to add a new view

1. The first thing you'll want to do is give your view a name. This is the name that will appear in the View menu so you can quickly access the view.

2. Next you'll want to do is choose your Customer Group hierarchy and also select which level of your hierarchy you want to be at. This is the level that you wish to manage your long terms plans at. In this walkthrough, we'll be choosing "State". This will set the first columns in your view.

3. Next, you'll need to choose your Item hierarchy and choose which level you want to plan at for your Items. We'll be choosing "Brand". This will set the next columns in your view.

Naming and selecting hierarchies for our configuration

1. Now, we'll set up the type of data we want to show. We can either show a straight sale type (history OR forecast) or a combination type (history and forecast combined). We'll start by choosing our "History" Sale Type that we have for this database. Note: you can add any Sale Type you want.

2. Choose the Calendar of the history for this column. We'll be choosing "FY23".

3. The Growth % allows you to show a growth percentage of this Sale Type/Calendar combo with another Sale Type/Calendar. For now, we will leave this as "Disabled" or off. We'll come back to this in a bit.

4. Leave the 'can edit' check box unchecked. We don't want to update our history.

Adding a sale type to the configuration

1. Click the "Save" button. This will close the configure window and the Long Term Planning page will refresh and present data based on the configuration you chose.

Our example Long Term Planning configuration

The view built using our Long Term Planning configuration

To build on this simple configuration, let's add another Sale Type along with a Growth %.

1. Go back to the view button in the top-right of the page and click on it.

2. Click on "Configure".

3. Click on the '...' button beside the view name and select 'Edit'

Select to edit the view

1. Below the Sales Type row we added previously, we'll add a Sale Type called "LTP".

2. Check the 'can edit' checkbox.

3. Choose the Calendar. We will set this to FY24.

4. Choose Growth %. We'll keep building on our example and choose "History - FY23"

5. Click the "Save" button.

Adding an editable sale type and growth %

Displaying the new editable Sale Type and its Growth % column

Making updates

Within the Long Term Planning page, you can be at any level of the Item and Customer Group hierarchy and make updates to the annual plan. You have a handful of ways to make your updates:

1. Update volume

2. Update growth percentage

With these various update ways, the end result is the same. The data will reconcile down to the lowest level Item @ Customer Group level. See Reconciliation explanation below to learn more on how Claret reconciles from a higher level down.

Let's walk through each of the four approaches to make your long term planning updates.

Update volume

We'll start with updating the value in the LTP column.

1. Double click into the editable cell.

2. Type in your new number.

3. Click outside of the cell.

Updating the LTP volume for the River Edge brand for Texas

Update growth percentage

The growth percentage column is a special column that allows you to compare a Sale Type/Calendar combination to another Sale Type/Calendar combination. It also allows you to update your volume via entering in a new growth percentage. By updating the growth percentage, Claret will determine what the equivalent volume is and enter in that volume number to be applied to that row.

1. Double click into the editable Growth % cell.

2. Type in your new percentage. Note: you don't need to add the % sign.

3. Click outside of the cell.

Updating the Growth % for the Clairemont brand for Texas

Sorting and filtering from the columns

Similar to other tabular data in Claret, you sort and filter data from the column headers of the tables.

Sort

To sort, just click on the the name of the column. This will toggle between ascending, descending and not sorting.

Filtering

1. Hover over the column header you'd like to filter. You will then see the menu icon appear (three horizontal lines)

Enabling the header menu

1. Click on the menu icon.

2. Chose the kind of filter.

3. Type in the text you want to filter with.

Filtering the Brand Group column

To remove the filter, simply click the 'Reset' button

Reconciliation

So, how does the reconciliation work? Let's review the below illustration. In the "Old" column, the ZAM Brand has a total of 100 cases which is the sum of the three items within that brand. In the "New" column, someone has overwritten the 100 cases at the brand level with 200 cases and that has reconciled down to the underlying items based on their respective contribution percentage (derived by their existing quantities) to the brand.