The Global Daily Usage settings control how daily usage is calculated in StockIQ. This is important, as there are several calculations, such as safety stock, days-of-supply, and others that rely on this days of supply calculation.
You can access this screen in the Admin --> System Configuration --> Daily Usage Settings
Minimum Days for Daily Usage - For very short lead time items, especially those with sporadic demand, a daily usage calculation over too short of a period can be too volatile to be useful. This setting allows you to specify a minimum number of work days over which daily usage is calculated to ensure some stability to the daily usage calculations. 2 months (42 work days) is a good starting point.
Max Days For DU on Highly Seasonal Items - Used in concert with the above setting, this allows you to specify a shorter time period (e.g. more reactive) for items that StockIQ determines to be highly seasonal.
The reason for wanting a shorter period is something like this - if you looked at usage over too long of a range for a highly seasonal item - say, Christmas trees at Christmas, you might ramp up too slowly for your inventory to change fast enough. Similarly, as you move out of season, average daily usage would stay high too long, possibly leaving you with excess after the item is out-of-season.
This setting is not required - set the value null to disable this setting.
Primary Demand Series - Allows you to specify which demand series should be used as your primary demand series. Normally, this is the same as your sales order history, and should not need to be changed.
Include Dependent Demand in Daily Usage - Specifies whether to include dependent demand in daily usage calculations for items. This should be checked in almost all cases.
IMPORTANT: This does not affect the usage numbers used in safety stock calculations, e.g. dependent usage can still be included in setting safety stock levels when this option is disabled. This is done so that you can decouple things like calculating days-of-supply from your safety stocking strategies for finished goods, raw materials, and components. See the Global Safety Stock Settings topic.
Dependent Usage Method - Specifies how dependent usage is calculated for things like forecasted usage quantities and therefore safety stock amounts.
If you use Dependent Forecast, you pull values from the dependent forecast table, which is built based on your Global Structure Settings explosion method, which is most commonly to net-and-offset by lead time and current inventory position. In this instance, dependent usage is increased or decreased by on hand quantities of the parent or spoke items, which can raise or lower dependent usage based on inventory position of those dependents. Order policy is accounted for as well, so non-stock items will not be included in the dependent usage for an item.
If the Global Structure Settings are set to the Offset only method, the Dependent Forecast setting here will look just at dependent forecast, but is not affected by current inventory position of the parent or spoke, nor does it account for the order policy of the parent/spoke item.
If this setting is set to Parent Forecast, or your Global Structure Settings explosion method is set to Passthrough, then no offsetting and netting is done, and dependent usage is from the direct passthrough from the Parent assembly (or spoke) forecasts.