Forecast Pro XE and Forecast Pro Basic

Create Accurate Forecasts Quickly and Easily

Forecast Pro is easy to learn and easy to use. In fact, using Forecast Pro's Expert Selection mode, you can create accurate forecasts in minutes—even if you don’t have a background in forecasting or statistics! Powerful enough to take on all of your forecasting challenges, Forecast Pro provides a complete range of forecasting models and all the diagnostic tools you need. And, there's much more—making adjustments based on your business knowledge, creating dazzling presentations, working with your existing data, interfacing with other systems—it's all a breeze with Forecast Pro!

The Right Tool for the Job

Using Forecast Pro XE and Forecast Pro Basic, you can create accurate forecasts easily by relying on the numerous proven statistical forecasting methods incorporated in the software. Both editions include:

• Expert Selection - Expert Selection takes the guesswork out of forecasting. The built-in expert system analyzes your data, selects the appropriate forecasting technique, builds the model and calculates the forecasts—it even explains its reasoning in ordinary English!
• Exponential Smoothing - Twelve different Holt-Winters exponential smoothing models are provided to accommodate a wide range of data characteristics. The robustness of exponential smoothing makes it ideal when there are no leading indicators, and when the data are too short or volatile for Box-Jenkins. You can select the model and set the parameters yourself or let Forecast Pro do it automatically.
• Seasonal Simplification - This is a useful technique if you are forecasting data with more than 12 observations per year. Seasonal Simplification reduces the number of seasonal indexes used to model the data and often substantially improves forecast accuracy.
• Box-Jenkins - For stable data sets, Forecast Pro supports a multiplicative seasonal Box-Jenkins model. The model can be built completely automatically or interactively using a full range of screen-oriented diagnostics.
• Low Volume Models - Croston's intermittent demand model and discrete data models are provided to accommodate low volume and "sparse" data (i.e., data where the demand is often zero).
• Curve Fitting - Curve fitting provides a quick and easy way to identify the general form of the curve which your data are following. Forecast Pro supports four types of curves-straight line, quadratic, exponential and growth (S-curve).
• Simple Methods - This set of “simple” models can be extremely useful. Moving average, “same as last year,” percentage growth and fixed forecast value models are included.

Forecast Pro XE is a desktop analysis tool designed to satisfy both basic and advanced forecasting needs. Forecast Pro XE offers promotional modeling, causal modeling (dynamic regression), the ability to define and reconcile hierarchies, and allows you to forecast up to 100 items at a time. Forecast Pro XE includes all of the forecasting methods found in Forecast Pro Basic as well as:

• Dynamic regression - If there are important leading indicators, use Forecast Pro XE's dynamic regression. You can include independent variables, lagged or transformed variables and build generalized Cochrane-Orcutt models. Using Forecast Pro XE’s self-interpreting diagnostics, you can build and compare alternative models with a few clicks of the mouse.
• Event models - Event models extend exponential smoothing by providing adjustments for special events like promotions, strikes or other irregular occurrences. You can adjust for events of several different types such as promotions of varying sizes or types, or movable holidays like Easter and Rosh Hashanah. Event models are easy to build and adaptable to a variety of situations.
• Multiple-level models - Multiple-level models allow you to aggregate data into groups that can be reconciled using a top-down or bottom-up approach to produce consistent forecasts at all levels of aggregation. There is no limitation on the number of levels; a maximum of 100 items (SKUs, in the example below) are supported in Forecast Pro XE. Seasonal and event indexes can be extracted from the higher-level aggregates and applied to lower-level data.

• Batch forecasting - Forecast Pro XE's batch procedure allows you to forecast up to 100 items at a time. Forecast Pro automatically builds a model for each item and prepares the forecasts. You can tell the program which model to use or you can let Expert Selection decide. If you need to forecast more than 100 items you should consider Forecast Pro Unlimited.

Add Your Business Knowledge

Forecast Pro lets you adjust your forecasts on a graph or in a spreadsheet-like display—in either view, you see both the historical data and forecasted values, allowing you to easily compare patterns within the data. You can adjust single points, ranges or totals, using percentages, increments or by simply entering new values. If you’ve defined a multiple-level hierarchy, adjusting a value at any given level will automatically adjust all appropriate levels.

Make Convincing Presentations

With Forecast Pro, you can create dazzling, presentation-quality reports in seconds. Four professionally-designed standardized report formats are included as well as a custom reporting option for maximum flexibility. You can graph your results on a time series or year-over-year basis, choose from several eye-catching formats including 3-D lines and 3-D columns, and save your reports directly to Excel.

Work With Your Existing Data

Forecast Pro imports data in a variety of flexible, easy-to-create formats including Excel and Lotus spreadsheets, text files and ODBC. These flexible formats allow you to easily import and export data from virtually any source. There is also an on-line editor to enter your data directly, or to modify and amend files.

Diagnose Your Models

Forecast Pro provides a standardized set of diagnostic screens to help you compare and evaluate models. You get graphs of the residuals and the error autocorrelation function, grid displays of the correlation matrix and covariance matrix, as well as key numeric statistics: Adjusted R-Square, MAPE, Sample Size, Mean, Schwartz BIC, Ljung-Box, RMSE, Standard Deviation, MAD, R-Square and Standard Forecast Error.

Evaluate Alternative Forecasts

If you define a holdout sample, Forecast Pro will automatically generate out-of-sample MAPE, MAD and GMRAE statistics to measure forecast performance. This handy feature allows you to quickly evaluate different models and answer questions like "How accurate would my forecasts have been had I used Forecast Pro last year?"