Grouping customers consolidates their demand history and can significantly improve the accuracy of forecasts generated from the demand history. They are grouped using two forecasting-specific groups, Forecast Customer Group and, optionally, Forecast Sales Group.
You may wish to forecast major customers by customer, in which case you assign them their own forecast customer group or forecast sales group. You may also wish to only forecast some products by customer for some customers, in which case you assign these customers their own forecast customer group or forecast sales group only for those products.
You assign forecast customer groups and forecast sales groups to customers, or to customer/product combinations, using the Forecast Customer and Sales Group Settings (previously named the Forecast Customer and Sales Group Matrix). This provides a highly flexible means of grouping customers for forecasting. In later versions of Demand Forecasting the option is provided to use existing fields already set up for customers such as Price Group, Sales Group & Segment to simplify the assignment of their forecast customer and sales groups.