Good question. Since I didn’t design AX, I can’t speak for the people that originally wrote the label. However, I DO know that this term has caused confusion in the past. In fact, I’ve heard for a couple of years that Microsoft was eventually going to come up with a new name for it. Well, our wishes have been granted. In the new Dynamics AX, futures messages have been renamed to calculated delays. You can see this in a couple of places. First, the new master planning workspace shows the “Delay (days)” very clearly to show how delayed a particular planned order will be. 
Secondly, the master plans parameters form, although it looks virtually identical to the same form in previous versions of AX, replaces the “Futures” fast tab with a “Calculated delays” fast tab. 
This simple renaming makes it a lot clearer exactly what this data is trying to show and lowers the bar of “AX speak” it’ll take to understand the product going forward. Couldn’t be happier!
