Demand Patterns refer to the pattern of demand throughout the month. For example, do you do most of your sales at the beginning, most at the end, or is it fairly evenly distributed?
There are two primary uses for the demand pattern information in StockIQ, when enabled.
First, using this info, StockIQ will take your monthly or weekly forecast, and apply the demand pattern to it when breaking it down to day-by-day values for the order schedule. In this way, especially if you have short lead times, the day-by-day forecast more accurately represents the expected demand on each day of the month, or week, than a simple flat distribution of the demand forecast.
The second usage is for the current period prediction feature. Using the demand pattern, StockIQ can then more accurately predict a monthly total. For example, if you are 50% through the month, but 90% of your sales come in the first week of the month usually, then SIQ would know to expect only a small amount of remaining demand (e.g. the last 10%), versus expecting another 50% of sales.
NOTE: Demand Patterns come with a performance penalty, so they are disabled by default. You can turn them on in the System Configuration if you wish, or contact StockIQ Support for more details.