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 [...]
If you are forecasting a time series that contains an outlier, there is a danger that the outlier could have a significant impact on the forecast. One solution to this problem is to screen the historical data for outliers and replace them with more typical values prior to generating the forecasts. This process is referred [...]
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 [...]