Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Sales and Inventory Forecast Setup (DEMO)

I want to show you how easy it is to set up the sales and inventory forecast functionality in Dynamics 365 Business Central. Let’s start out by looking at this item here in the item card there’s a forecast window down here you can see that fact window right there and I already have a forecast set up and running in my system. But let’s take a look at how I did that.

So what I’m going to do here is I’m going to delete this forecast for this particular item there it goes and this is real handy. This gives me access to almost

everything about forecasting in Business Central. So let’s take a look at the forecast settings these are the forecast settings I’m using for my system now there’s a number of things here.  I’m linking out to the forecast model provided by Microsoft and I’m also selecting a particular time series model these are statistical models about how to create a forecast and there’s different ones that are available.

I’m combining two here and we’ll use this to get this set up you want to go to this screen and then you’re going to open up the Azure artificial intelligence gallery

now this seems complicated but follow me through this. It’s really quite easy and it’s all available from this screen so I’m going to click on this it opens up this page and these are the steps that you need to complete this part of the setup. I’m going to open this up in studio this is where my environment is so I’m going to select that so this is all set up for you you don’t have to change anything this looks very complicated but it’s really easy to use so once I’m at this page I’m going to run it.  It’ll take a couple minutes to run and then I’m going to click on the deploy web services and this provides the information that I’m going to need for the sales and inventory setup screen in Business Central I’ve got the API key here and then I want to generate the API and I get this result right here.

Here’s information that I need to then copy and paste into the sales and inventory forecast setup screen in Business Central. So all I need to do on this page is copy the API and the URI link from the web services screen we are just on and also the API key and paste them into the screen I can make changes here on these variables that’ll go into the forecasting and once I set this up we can take a look at the scheduling. So this is a scheduling it’s going to be run as a job in Business Central and you can see that information here I’m running it every day but I can also run it on an ad hoc basis I can just say update forecast it’ll go ahead and update the forecast.

Let’s go back to this item here there’s not a sales forecast available because I deleted it earlier but we can run it for this item right from this page so go to actions forecast so we’ll update the forecast and you can see here that this is a combination of those two methods that we looked at earlier what’s nice about this is from the screen you can change those time series methods and take a look at the results so if I wanted to do that all I need to do is go to forecast settings I can select a different method here. Let’s just go with the ETS. I’ll save that. I’m back at the screen this still has the old forecast in it but let me run it again. You’ll see it change slightly so now it’s moved up it’s just using the one method and the forecast is a little higher. This is the sales forecast I can also look at the inventory forecast and I can see I already have a problem so this is the basic setup for the sales and inventory forecast in Dynamics 365 Business Central.  It looks a little

daunting but really it’s quite easy you can access all this functionality directly from a particular item card in the forecast fact box and move ahead with the process.