What it tells you
Demand is the total expected consumption of the product in each period — everything you expect to draw down that product to satisfy. It appears as a row for each product on the Supply planning grid, one value per time bucket. For a warehouse, demand splits into two parts:- Forecast demand — demand coming from your sales or channel forecast (what customers are expected to buy).
- Production demand — the product consumed by manufacturing, when it is a component in a bill of materials (BOM, the recipe of parts that go into a finished product).
How to read it
Expand a Demand cell to see the detail behind the total: demand broken out per channel (which sales channels are driving it) and per production line (which manufacturing lines are consuming it). This helps you trace a spike or dip back to its source. When a scenario is active, a Demand cell becomes an editable input. You can type a different value to test a what-if change, and there is also a bulk adjustment that applies a percentage change across future periods at once — useful for modeling a promotion, a lost customer, or a market shift without touching your base plan.What to do about it
Demand is mostly a signal to read rather than an action row, but it drives everything downstream: your coverage, your Supply recommendations, and your shortages. When you are running a scenario, edit Demand to see how the plan responds before committing to a change.Example
A component shows total Demand of 5,000 for the period. Expanding it reveals 3,000 as Forecast demand from sales channels and 2,000 as Production demand from a finished good that uses this component. In an active scenario, you raise the forecast portion by 10% across the next several periods to model a promotion and watch how supply needs shift.Note: In an exported file, this column may be labeled “consumption” — it is the same thing. See Supply for the inbound side, Raw-material planning for how production demand flows through BOMs, and Scenarios for editable what-if planning.