Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations strongm on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Simple Stock Forecasting Model (NOT Stock Mgmt)

Status
Not open for further replies.

Chunkus

Technical User
Jun 12, 2003
24
GB
Hi

I'm looking to build a simple stock forecasting system, and NOT a complex stock management model, and need some help on the design. The volume of data excludes Excel - where my real expertise is.

Data
1.Products - circa 6000 (categorized into many groups)
2.Time period - 52 weeks.
3.Forecast Sales Demand (product by week)
4.Forecast purchases (product by week)

I'm looking to build a simple model that effectively calculates Closing stock (by product, by week):
ie Opening stock + purchases - sales = Closing stock.

Many of the examples I have seen state you should not store the stock quantities (as they are dependent variables), and instead calculate when required.

However, I'm not trying to build a stock management model, Im trying to build a forecasting model. The data is going to be relatively static, tweeked now and again. When tweaked, I plan to re-run the process to update the stock table.

I need a method of calculating available stock. What is your advice on creating such a model?

In Excel, I would use VBA to loop through the products, calculating the c/stk, (with week n+1 o/stk being Week n's c/stk). I'm not at all sure on how to do this in Access!

With limited experience of stock models & Access, I'm rather stuck! My current thinking:
For each product, and for each week.
Calculate: O/Stk + purchases - sales.
I'm ok with week 1 stock, as it will be the opening stock value. But how do you link week n+1 to week n's closing stock? (for each product, and each week)

Is there a better way of doing this?

As you can see, I need some Access Help!!!!!
Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thx
 
Hi

I decided the easiest way was to:

Calculate cumulative purchases AND sales by week, and product, using DSUM to provide the net cumulative movement by week.

I had some fun with quotes until I found:

The calculated net movement can then be added to opening stock to provide forecast stock by week.

Hope this useful to somebody else!
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top