Demand Forecasting for Green Coffee BuyersWhat is Demand Forecasting? Estimating how much coffee our company will use in the future is an essential activity for all green coffee buyers. Having accurate demand forecasts lets our company buy the right amount of coffee, keeps us from running out of important green coffee components, and lets us schedule purchases and releases with sufficient lead time. In this article, we’ll look at calculating the following core concepts: Expected Weekly Coffee Use (lbs) Weeks of Inventory Inventory on Hand Using these core concepts, we can create a simple system for forecasting demand that will help us manage green coffee inventory and prevent common and costly mistakes. Expected Weekly Coffee Use (lbs): Accurately predicting how much of each green coffee component our company will use in the future is essential for managing the inventory of green coffee at the roastery. Here we’re going to explore how to generate a projection for Expected Weekly Coffee Use (lbs) for each of the coffees that we have in our inventory. To make these projections, we calculate how much of each coffee we have been using on average during a certain period of time, and then we use those values to project how much coffee we are likely to need in the future. The simplest way to find this value is to keep a spreadsheet that records how much of each coffee we use every week. We can get the data for how much of each coffee we’re using each week by pulling a cropster production report. If we’re not using cropster, then we can get this data by taking a physical count of our inventory at the end of each week, and subtracting our inventory at the end of the week from our inventory at the end of the previous week. Now, to create our projection for Expected Weekly Coffee Use (lbs), we simply have the spreadsheet calculate how much of each coffee we’ve been using on average each week. Below, the spreadsheet is using the average of the last 8 weeks of coffee use. 6-8 weeks is a good starting place. We could use fewer weeks if we want the calculation to be more sensitive to changes in demand, or more weeks if we want it to be less sensitive. Below, the Expected Weekly Coffee Use (lbs) is shown in row 14.  This spreadsheet template for coffee roaster demand projection is available for free on www.efficiency.coffee. Important note: When recording data about how much coffee you are roasting each week to make projections about the future, it’s a good practice to always use only green coffee weights. We do not need to consider roasted coffee yield when using this simple method for green coffee inventory management. Weeks of Inventory On-Hand: Once we have our Expected Weekly Coffee Use (lbs), it’s also useful to calculate Weeks of Inventory for each coffee. Weeks of Inventory is the amount of each coffee that we currently have in the warehouse, expressed in weeks. It shows us how many weeks of each coffee we have until we run out of each coffee. Having this value makes it easy for us to see how much time we have before we need to reorder each of our green coffee components. We first need to know our Inventory on Hand for each of our green coffee components. This value is simply the amount of a coffee that we have at the roastery in lbs. We can now calculate Weeks of Inventory by dividing our Inventory on Hand by Expected Weekly Coffee Use (lbs). The spreadsheet below from www.efficiency.coffee shows Weeks of Inventory in column E. The value is calculated as Inventory on Hand (shown in column D) / Expected Weekly Coffee Use (lbs). 
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