Sometimes making changes to near-term forecasts can be an expensive proposition. Last minute changes often significantly increase production and procurement costs, decrease profitability, and negatively impact other aspects of the business. To protect against these effects, many companies establish “time fences” to prohibit changes to the forecast over a defined short-term horizon. This edition of Tips & [...]
In Forecast Pro TRAC, you have the ability to import externally-generated forecasts into the override grid view. We can choose which of these forecasts we want to use as our “baseline” forecast. This can be done either on an item-by-item basis or for groups of items. If we have specified a baseline forecast that is [...]
Forecast Pro TRAC provides a wide array of exception reports, including reports which monitor your archived forecasts (i.e., previously created and saved forecasts) and reports which monitor your current forecasts (i.e., the forecasts you are working with but haven’t yet finalized). Exception reports enable you to quickly find cases where key performance metrics have fallen [...]
Forecast Pro TRAC provides a wide array of exception reports, including reports which monitor your archived forecasts (i.e., previously created and saved forecasts) and reports which monitor your current forecasts (i.e., the forecasts you are working on but haven’t yet finalized). Exception reports enable you to quickly find cases where your forecast error or some other [...]
Here’s a question that we get all the time: what forecast accuracy should we target? The answer varies widely across industries and organizations–there is no single “optimal” forecast accuracy (other than 100% accuracy, which is not practical)! The one universal answer is that forecast accuracy can be considered “good” when it is an improvement over the [...]
Forecast Pro’s Expert Selection system can generate thousands of forecasts automatically; however, the automatic forecasting approach can fall short if the historical data do not represent a typical demand pattern for a given item because of certain events. For example, an unexpected large order may inflate the forecast for the following year, or a stockout [...]
If you want to see the new Event Manager available in Forecast Pro TRAC v3.1 and Forecast Pro [Extended] v8.1, then you will want to check out the recording of our recent Webinar about using events to improve your forecasting. The educational hour-long session explains how event models work, how and when they should be [...]
Watch the recording of our educational one-hour Webinar. http://youtu.be/coeFfecxNw8 You will learn: How event models work How and when event models should be used How to build customized event variables to meet your needs Best practices for applying event models
This installment of Forecasting 101 discusses the importance of tracking forecast accuracy, explains the basic approach and illustrates how to use the results to improve your forecasting process. […]