Consulting · Demand forecasting
Unified Demand Forecast for retail: demand models, Demand Influencing Factors and the road from SAP F&R to Customer Activity Repository.
The basics
SAP UDF (Unified Demand Forecast) is the statistical forecasting engine inside SAP Customer Activity Repository. It produces a single demand plan that every consuming retail application can rely on — no more one forecast per system.
UDF builds that plan from Demand Influencing Factors: price, promotions, seasonality, weather, holidays, cannibalisation between articles. It handles the cases that break simpler forecasting tools — prepacks, sets, generic-variant articles and dependencies between sites — which is why it fits retail and fashion rather than generic supply chain.
Its output feeds SAP Replenishment Planning for stores and SAP Predictive Replenishment for distribution centres, and it is the forecast behind SAP Promotion Management and SAP Assortment Planning.
The transition
If you are running SAP Forecasting and Replenishment today, UDF is where that road leads. SAP has moved retail demand forecasting into the Customer Activity Repository, and the split is now clear: UDF forecasts, Replenishment Planning replenishes.
That transition is not a technical upgrade. Your forecast models, your parameters and years of tuning have to survive the move, or you go live with a system that predicts worse than the one you replaced.
We have been working with SAP F&R for more than ten years and with UDF for the last six, so we have seen both sides of that migration. The same team that knows why your current forecast behaves the way it does is the one that rebuilds it in UDF.
What we do
We take retailers already live on F&R into Customer Activity Repository: assessment of the current setup, mapping of forecast logic and master data, model migration, parallel running and cutover. The goal is that forecast quality does not drop on the day you switch.
Full Unified Demand Forecast projects: blueprint, CAR configuration, demand model design, DIF definition, integration with Replenishment Planning, batch design and go-live support. We apply the same Rapid Deployment approach we use in F&R — retail best practices and pre-defined configuration — to shorten time and budget.
Most forecasts underperform because nobody revisits them after go-live. We review the demand models you already have, tune the Demand Influencing Factors, test what-if scenarios and measure the result, so the forecast improves against your own history instead of against a benchmark.
Ongoing UDF support with defined SLAs, in the same format as our SAP F&R support plans. Questions about forecast results, model behaviour, data flows or errors — logged in the support portal and answered by consultants who work on UDF every day.
Why Atalaya
Tell us what you run today and what worries you about the move. The forecast you have tuned for years is the thing that has to survive it.
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Contact
Send us the details and we will come back to you with a concrete answer — not a brochure. We work with retail companies across Europe from our Barcelona office.
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