Demand Planning helps you understand whether your inventory will cover future demand, before stockouts or overstock happen. It combines your sales history, forecasts, and inventory levels into one clear planning view.
About demand planning
Demand Planning is Swap's forecasting and planning workspace. It's designed to help you answer one key question: will my stock cover demand in the coming weeks?
It includes:
A demand planning chart (timeline view)
A demand planning table
Forecasted risk visibility for the coming weeks
How the Swap forecast is built
Swap automatically generates forecasts using an AI-powered model. It analyses up to two years of your historical sales data to identify trends, seasonality, and demand patterns. This powers both the chart and table views, as well as forecasted risk.
Swap's forecast is built at the variant level, so it accounts for your size curvature. Forecasts are then aggregated up to product and category level.
Collaborating with the forecast
You can adjust the forecast directly in Swap to reflect your own context and judgement. This makes it easy to incorporate:
Marketing activity
Launches and promotions
Supplier delays or earlier deliveries
Trading performance and gut feel
Swap combines your forecast edits with the generated forecast, so your plan reflects what you actually expect to happen.
Forecasted risk
Demand Planning includes forecasted risk so you can spot where your inventory plan may be heading — stockouts, low cover warnings, or overstock situations.
Risk is calculated based on forecasted demand and your stock cover thresholds, and visualised directly in the chart.
Risk levels
Healthy (no risk shown)
Warning (shown in orange)
Stockout (shown in red)
Demand Planning chart and adjustments
The chart gives you a single timeline view of your sales, forecasts, and inventory position.
What the chart shows
By default, the chart displays:
The past four weeks of sales history
The current week
The next 26 weeks of forecasted demand and inventory
To extend your forecast view beyond 26 weeks, contact your Swap account manager.
How to use the chart
Hover over any week to view detailed data
Toggle legends to focus on specific data points
Click a week to open a side panel with deeper insights and breakdowns
Filtering your view
Filter by product, variant (SKU), or category. This lets you zoom out for a full-range view, or zoom in to understand risk at product or SKU level.
Demand Planning table
The table gives you the same forecast and inventory view as the chart, in a structured weekly format. It's useful for comparing weeks side-by-side or exporting planning data.
It helps you review and validate forecasted sales units, forecasted inventory levels, inbound stock impact (if connected), and risk levels over time.
Demand Planning history
Demand Planning includes recent historical performance so you can compare what actually happened, what was forecasted, and how demand is trending.
Swap shows the last four weeks of history alongside your forecast, so you can quickly identify whether performance is ahead or behind plan and adjust accordingly.
Monthly forecast updates
As your sales evolve, Swap updates your forecast based on the latest data each month. You can download the monthly refresh file — which shows the top forecast changes — from the banner or the version history.
