Please see these details below;

IFS Applications 10 Demand Planner error "The period has already been aggregated. Create Forecast can only be run once per period"

Introduction:

From IFS Applications 10 it is only possible to run the Demand Planner ‘Create Forecast’ job once per period (which will usually be a week or a month depending on how the period versions are defined). 

The reason for this change was the introduction of the ‘Moveable Holiday’ functionality and the way in which Demand Planner computes these values.

There is often a requirement to run the Create Forecast job more than once per period when the functionality is being tested or when training is taking place.

In order to address this requirement, a change can be made to the Registry Settings of the machine that is hosting the Demand Server (which is normally a Virtual Machine). 

From IFS Applications 10 (Update 8) DP Server 6.02.xxx, it is also possible to amend the Registry Settings directly at database level.  Although the default settings are initially taken from the registry of the Demand Server virtual machine, they are then copied and maintained at database level.  As a result, this is where they will need to be changed.

Registry Setting:

The Registry Setting that needs to be updated is called ‘FixedDate’.

It will have a NULL value by default, but this can be updated to a real date with the format YYYYMMDD

The 'FixedDate' value will then be used by the Demand Server each time it runs.  In other words, the Demand Server will always 'think' that it's the Fixed Date when it looks at the historic transactions and creates the forward forecast. 

The system will display a message stating 'Warning: Running Fixed Date' in the Demand Server / Server Dashboard Log when the Fixed Date is used.

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Note that any changes to the Registry or Database Settings should only be done by IFS Customer Services and only in the TEST or TRAINING database. 

These changes should NEVER be done in the PROD or LIVE database as the Demand Planner may not work correctly and data can be lost.

As a result, please request these changes by logging a support case/ticket with IFS Customer Services.

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Just wanted to save someone else time. In Cloud, you don’t need IFS to do this for you. The registry settings are available under “Supply Chain Planning  > Demand Planning > Basic Data > Demand Plan Server > select your server > Advanced Server Settings”. FixedDate is in there.  I waited for my support ticket to be answered only to learn it was there all along.

​@Richard Owen ​@brandon ​@majose 
We are currently testing Demand Planner (24R2) and have started using this FixedDate workaround to update our forecast more frequently. Something we’ve noticed however is that when the ‘Aggregate Daily’ or ‘Create Forecast’ server job is run, the last month of historical demand (imported via Forecast Day Import data and ‘External Import’ job) gets changed to value of ‘0’. The FixedDate used in this case was 20240301.

Are any of you able to re-create what we think is a bug?

If the originally loaded Demand value is added back manually in the Forecast Table tab shown, the forecast will re-adjust, but doing this for every part one-by-one is time consuming.

Hi,

Some comments on this …

1. Please note that the ‘Fixed Date’ setting should only be used for testing and should never be used in a live production environment.
2. Also, the recommended best practice solution for importing historic transactions into Demand Planner is to use the Manual Historic Demand Planning Data screen.

It is possible to import data directly into the underlying table using the data migration tool, and any data in this table is automatically available in the standard Demand Planner Base Flow view called comb_ext_inv_part_issue_pub

3. The reason why you are experiencing the reported problem is that the Forecast Day Import screen is being used together with the Create Forecast job. 

The main purpose of the Forecast Day Import screen is to import forecast data directly into Demand Planner rather than importing historic transactions.

What happens is that when you run the Create Forecast job, the system sees the Fixed Date and thinks today’s date = 2024-03-01.

Then, it will automatically clear down any data in the previous period (e.g., February 2024) and will run the SQL in the Base Flows.  As there are no historic transactions for February 2024, it will then return a value = 0 (as shown in your screen shot).

I hope that this helps!

​@Richard Owen Appreciate the quick response and verifying the behavior is as designed.

We’ll proceed with creating a fake customer to load our pre-aggregated demand history (not individual transactions) via migration job into the Manual Historic Demand Planning Data view. May also look into pros/cons/feasibility of trying to match legacy and IFS customer records to enable loading as not-aggregated transactional records in future testing cycles.

The inquisitive part of me still wonders what is accomplished by clearing the previous period demand history (and not the others) with the Forecast Day method, but I will survive Thanks again.