The customer groups function allows users to create a grouping of individual customers. This grouping in turn replaces the individual customers with an aggregate definition of demand. It is particularly helpful in Demand Planning as a means to focus the forecasting on larger groups of similar customers.
Creating a Customer Group
To create a customer group, click:
- Utilities
- Customer Groups
- Add New
The Add New page opens
- Enter a name for the new customer group
- Select the Customers that will comprise the new group and click the arrow button to move the customer to the selected group. Use the CTRL key to enable multi-select.
- Clicking on the double chevron will move all the items in the list without selecting.
Customers are Added
When all the customers are added, click "Save" to save the new group.
The new group is visible in the list
To change the customers added to the group, click the edit button.
Upload Customer Orders
After creating the new group, the next time the customer orders file is uploaded, all the customer codes for the customers which are part of the new customer group are replaced with the new customer group. In addition, the individual customers that are grouped will be automatically deactivated.
If you are running the S&OP Platform, and do not have the automated update of the Demand Plan view enabled, you will need to run a new Pareto to allow the new customer group to become visible.
Upload the grouping as a file
Create a tab delimited text file named 'customergrouping.txt' with the following columns:
- Column 1 - Customer code
- Column 2 - Customer group name
For groups already created from the user interface, if there is at least one occurrence in the file, it deletes all previously linked members and the inserts those from the file. If there's no occurrence in the file - nothing is changed.
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