A great Forecast Pro success story is the Oberto Sausage Company. Oberto Sausage Company is a leading manufacturer of meat snacks and sausage products. Based in Washington, USA, the family-owned company has been in business for more than 85 years. Oberto sells its products directly to mass merchandisers and major supermarket chains.
What took Oberto to Forecast Pro was they were dealing with consistent double-digit growth and where event-driven demand is always present; Oberto needed a forecasting system which would allow them to do the following:
- routinely model and forecast ongoing "base" demand
- easily incorporate field-based knowledge of expected deviation from base demand
- keep track of changes to the forecast along with the assumptions underlying those changes
- develop consumption-based forecasts for key business segments and integrate those forecasts into the overall forecast, and
- maintain an optimal balance between forecast quality and the complexity, cost and resources devoted to generating the forecast.
Forecast Pro was the only solution that could deliver for their requirements. At Oberto they have a full compliment of Forecast Pro products. Oberto are using Forecast Pro as the main foundation for their demand forecasting process—it’s where the forecast is generated and maintained. After the forecast is established in Forecast Pro, it is fed into their ERP system where it drives procurement, planning/ scheduling and plant execution.
Forecast Pro has delivered results back to Oberto. After initially employing a more complex and widely-deployed forecasting process and system, Oberto has opted for a more focused and streamlined approach using Forecast Pro as its backbone. Oberto points out key benefits of the forecast process and Forecast Pro is that they have been able to sustain years of double digit growth while inventory value has remained constant. Oberto with Forecast Pro has also been able to strategically identify potential gaps in our plans where we may have shortfalls with important customers and move proactively to fill those gaps.
Overall Forecast Pro is used for everything from planning/scheduling all the way up to revenue projection by the executive team. To understand the power of Forecast Pro try a free month’s trial of Forecast Pro for your own company.
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Forecast Pro offers a comprehensive set of solutions for improving the quality, reliability, and speed of budgeting and forecasting activities throughout your business. Not only is Forecast Pro’s business forecasting software the most accurate available, it also makes the process of creating forecasts easy for your company and staff. Regardless if you have data warehouses full of historical data or only your best management estimates, Forecast Pro helps you produce the highest quality forecasts possible using Wizard-style guides, easy-to-assemble models, and interactive reports.
Forecast Pro understands that the true power of any forecasting software lies in the forecasting models. Unlike other forecasting software options, Forecast Pro looks to combines all the proven forecasting methods into one solution that suits your business and your company. Such Forecast Pro examples would be
1: Time-series forecasting: Forecasting techniques to extrapolate trends and patterns from your historical data over time bands.
2: Simulation-based forecasting: Forecast Pro can evaluate scenarios based on your latest analysis and “what if” assumptions.
3: Statistical forecasting: Forecast Pro can automatically look to the relationships between multiple inputs and your business outcomes.
For those who are new to forecasting, Forecast Pro can walk you through each step in the forecasting process using wizard-style guides. The great advantage of Forecast Pro and forecasting software is when you can go past the data. Forecast Pro lets you go beyond forecasting by telling you exactly what drives your forecast and what you can do about it.
1: Forecast Pro What-if analysis: You can stress test your forecasts under critical scenarios.
2: Forecast Pro Sensitivity analysis: Gives the user the ability to reviews their forecasts and determines which factors have the greatest impacts.
2: Forecast Pro Forecast optimization: Enables you to determine the best possible business decisions in order to improve future outcomes.
Forecasts are always inputs to some other decision-making process within an organization; so, Forecast Pro lets you dynamically link your forecasts to these processes. So if you are new to forecasting or just looking to improve what you are already doing check out our free white paper on Sales & Operation Planning.
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Forecast Pro is one of the tools that answer the question, what is the right tool for the job. Sales forecasting and business planning is hard enough with using the wrong tool or forecasting software. Our clients find that Forecast Pro is the right tool at the right time for any sales forecasting or business planning. With Forecast Pro, businesses can create accurate forecasts quickly and easily using proven statistical forecasting methods. Forecast Pro Research has shown that no single method works best for all data, which is why Forecast Pro provides a complete range of forecasting approaches to address all types of business needs. Forecast Pro’s models accommodate seasonal demand, product hierarchies, product promotions, slow moving items, causal variables, outliers and much more.
Forecast Pro has many models to accommodate current business challenges, listed below is a list of some of the Forecast Pro forecasting models.
Forecast Pro Model 1: Expert Selection – Forecast Pro 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
Forecast Pro Model 2: Exponential Smoothing – Forecast Pro includes twelve Holt-Winters exponential smoothing models to accommodate data with different forms of trends and seasonal patterns.
Forecast Pro Model 3: Box-Jenkins – For stable data sets, Forecast Pro supports a multiplicative seasonal Box-Jenkins model. Your Forecast Pro business model can be built completely automatically or interactively with the assistance of a full range of screen-oriented diagnostics.
Forecast Pro Model 3: Dynamic Regression – Forecast Pro Dynamic regression is used when there are important leading indicators or other causal variables. You can include independent variables, lagged or transformed variables and build generalized Cochrane-Orcutt models. Using Forecast Pro’s self-interpreting diagnostics, you can build and compare alternative models with a few clicks of the mouse.
Forecast Pro Model 4: Event Models – This extension of exponential smoothing provides adjustments for special events like promotions, strikes, moveable holidays or other irregular occurrences.
Forecast Pro Model 5 : Multiple-Level Models – Multiple-level models allow you to aggregate data into groups and reconcile them using top-down or bottom-up approaches to produce consistent forecasts at all levels of aggregation. Seasonal and event indexes can be extracted from the higher-level aggregates and applied to lower-level data.
Forecast pro works for many businesses and the best way to experience for your business is with a 30 Day trial. Click here to find out more about how a free 30 day trial can work for your business.
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Forecast Pro fills the gap that some many business are looking for in today’s business environment. Forecast Pro is easy to learn and easy to use. In fact, using Forecast Pro’s Expert Selection mode, business managers can create accurate forecasts in minutes. Forecast Pro appeals to such a wide range of managers even don’t have a background in forecasting or statistics. Forecast Pro combines a broad range of proven forecasting models with an impressive set of tools for data visualization, analysis and reporting to address the challenges facing business forecasters today.
With Forecast Pro, you can do it all—generate accurate forecasts quickly, make adjustments based on your business knowledge, collaborate with colleagues, create dazzling presentations, interface directly with other systems and monitor your forecasting performance. Forecast Pro will save your business time and money while improving your planning and decision making.
But how does Forecast Pro compare to Excel as forecasting software tool? It is very likely that most business will have Excel on their computers. There is no doubt that Excel is a great product, but it’s not designed for forecasting nor as forecasting software. Spreadsheet forecasting almost always relies on simple, ad-hoc formulas built into large, unwieldy, complex spreadsheets. This creates a forecasting process that is prone to unintentional human error and is very difficult to maintain as the business, its forecasting challenges and as staff keep moving. For businesses that take advantage of Forecast Pro for business forecasting and planning are taking advantage of a product specially developed for their business forecasting needs. Forecast Pro provides them with an affordable, off-the-shelf solution which can dramatically improve their forecasting and formalize their forecasting process at the same time.
But how good is
Forecast Pro when compared to other Forecasting Software?
Forecast Pro’s Expert Selection forecasting outperformed all other software packages and 16 out of 17 academic teams in the largest and most comprehensive empirical forecasting study ever performed. The only way to truly understand
Forecast Pro is to try it for your business, so take full advantage for our
30 day free trial of Forecast Pro for UK and Irish companies.
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Testing times for everybody mean we are trying more and more ways to resolve problems. In our business we are constantly being asked by pressurised business owners and managers, how can I handle such erratic demand?, yet satisfy demand. I must reduce Stock, I can’t afford to hold it yet I must work with powerful suppliers otherwise they won’t give me stock when needed. Big problem and the answer is. DO the maths!
What do we mean? well maths includes statistics and elementary statists could be the answer to your problem. Sales forecasting software from MXI UK such as Forecast PRO examines trends in your sales, stock, purchasing histories. Statistics forecasting methodologies such exponential smoothing helps business everyday carry less stock meet weaker demand as it arises. The technical explanation is that statistical smoothing techniques common to sales forecasting software such as Forecast PRO weights recent sales, stock time series history (i.e. the financial crises & recession). In other words, recent observations are given slightly more weight in the forecast than the older observations. This is a very popular scheme to produce a smoothed Time Series.
Thats why we developed the very popular MXI free forecast review session. Send us your data and we will forecast it free online free. (UK/IRL) only:
We help companies and organisation to use Forecast PRO sales forecasting software exponential smoothing to detect seasonal changes in data by ignoring the irrelevant fluctuations irrelevant. Further we can select other methods such Holt Winters, simple trend-line or same as last year plus or minus a delta (if required), incremental growth.
Of course we encourage users to intervene directly themselves using the human experience and interaction to finesse the forecast. Sales forecasting software can’t be aware of increased advertising, reduced marketing, promotions, end of line, new product launches, etc. Sales forecasting software builds greater supply chain accuracy into the forecast. Results always need intepretation, human intervention and finessing.
Our Excel challenge works with organisation everyday to demonstrate how we can speed up forecasting, sales and operations planning, demand management. Check out the excel challenge for yourself to see how you can start moving in the right direction.
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June 2010-UK Retail rise again. Here are 2 Tips to take advantage Sales are rising in different retail sectors except food, In the UK sales forecasting software Forecast PRO is helping sales forecastors drive British economic growth whilst reducing on hand stock and finance costs.
For June the figures were UK retail sales rose 1.2% in comparison to June ‘09, when sales had picked up 1.4%. This June was slightly less hot, but sunny for most of the month. On a total basis, sales were up 3.4% against a 3.2% increase in June 2009.
As budgeting and forecast experts we are often asked what sales forecasting software to select to improve forecasting accuracy.
These business intelligence improvements reduce the cost of the budgeting and forecasting cycle. Any improvement here flows into in the Supply Chain, reducing logistics, packaging, warehousing, marketing and finance costs just for starters.
Seasonality and Trending is usually a big issue for forecasting and planning as it plays a very big role Supply Chain planning. The large ERP systems just have enough insight or flexibility to deliver the forecasting accuracy required. We constantly come across companies who are working with 40 - 60% forecasting accuracy where they need 70% plus accuracy at least.
Remember Statistics from the school days well could save your bacon now. Using Statistics on your sales histories provides valuable insights into your forecasting requirements. BIG ERP tends to give a simple average for the last 3 months Stock, Sales or Purchasing figures and projects forward on that basis. No Science, no business knowledge, no intuition, no exponential smoothing, just cut and paste. A waste of money. Now Stats just got a bit more interesting.
TIP – Get 2 years of data (SKU, Category, Product, Regional level) and find the trend in that. You can use Statistical methodologies to select the most appropriate sales forecasting methodology to forecast sales, tax revenue, passenger numbers. Track the impact of weather and season etc.
TIP – Avoid the hassle and expense of the above learning invest in sale forecasting software. Send us your data for forecasting
For example we use Forecast PRO sales forecasting software exponential smoothing to detect seasonal changes in data by ignoring the irrelevant fluctuations irrelevant. Forecast PRO exponential smoothing (unlike moving averages smoothing) older data is given progressively-less relative weight (importance) whereas newer data is given progressively-greater weight.
Also called averaging, it is employed in making short-term forecasts. Our Excel challenge works with organisation everyday to demonstrate how we can speed up forecasting, sales and operations planning, demand management. Check out the excel challenge for yourself to see how you can start moving in the right direction.
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Sales Forecasting software uses statistical forecasting methods to generate forecasting. We at MXI Software explain relevance of exponential smoothing for sales forecasting, budgeting and business modelling.
Exponential smoothing methods weight the historical data using exponentially decreasing weighting. The immeidiate prior period has the most weight and each period prior to it has relatively less weight. The decline in weight is expressed mathematically as an exponential function. The smoothing parameters determine the weights. To see the relevance of this in action we developed the mxi free forecasting offer. MXI 60 minute free forecast session:
Comparison Among Exponential Smoothing Methods
Single Exponential Smoothing: Identifies the percentage of weight given to the prior period and all other historical periods. It does not adjust for trend or for seasonal variance.
Double Exponential Smoothing: Finds trend then adjusts the forecast data to reflect this trend instead of generating a single parameter for all forecast periods.
Holt-Winters: Identifies both trend and seasonal variance, and adjusts the forecast data to reflect these factors. This method is tuned to both high and low outliers. A better choice for handling seasonality is Double Exponential Smoothing with the Data Filters parameter set to Seasonal Adjustment.
Advanced Parameters for Exponential Smoothing
These smoothing constants are used in the equations for exponential smoothing methods. Keep the default settings unless you have a strong background in time-series forecasting.
Alpha: Determines how responsive a forecast is to sudden jumps and drops. It is the percentage weight given to the prior period, and the remainder is distributed to the other historical periods. Alpha is used in all exponential smoothing methods.
The lower the value of alpha, the less responsive the forecast is to sudden change. A value of 0.5 is very responsive. A value of 1.0 gives 100% of the weight to the prior period, and gives the same results as a prior period calculation. A value of 0.0 eliminates the prior period from the analysis.
Beta: Determines how sensitive a forecast is to the trend. The smaller the value of beta, the less weight is given to the trend. The value of beta is usually small, because trend is a long-term effect. Beta is not used in Single Exponential Smoothing.
Gamma: Determines how sensitive a forecast is to seasonal factors. The smaller the value of gamma, the less weight is given to seasonal factors. Gamma is used only by the Holt-Winters method.
Trend Dampening: Determines how sensitive the forecast is to large trends in recent time periods. Dampening identifies how quickly the trend reverts to the mean. A higher value implies slower dampening while a lower value implies faster dampening. The smaller the value, the less effect the trend has on the forecast.
For each constant, you can specify a maximum value, a minimum value, and an interval. The interval is an incremental value between the maximum and minimum, which the forecasting engine uses to find the optimal value of the constant.
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Forecast Pro from MXI UK and Ireland is probably the most installed sales forecasting software in the world. Over 50,000 copies sold and the latest version Forecast Pro TRAC improves forecast accuracy, reducing costs in your supply chain. Sales and Operation planning at its best and for a fraction of the cost of some of the alternatives.
We are always asked why bother changing from Excel to Forecast Pro, it's okay isn't it. Yes maybe 3 years ago when the economy was booming worldwide. But now you need to carry way less stock and still meet your customer service levels. Suddenly Excel is missing the subtleties of trending. Forecast Pro reads these trends and captures them going forward, just what the Doctor ordered.
One the forecasting methodologies in Forecast Pro is Exponential Smoothing. It's an efficient, practical and effective means to forecasting time series data such as stock levels, footfall, passengers numbers, FMCG and SKU sales histories. We can automate it for batch processing, and also applied to relatively short time series and adapted to different patterns of trend and seasonality. Forecast Pro is award winning in most competitions and shows it to be more reliable than other more complicated methods of extrapolation. Perhaps its strongest attribute is its logical and tangible basis. In exponential smoothing, you estimate the current Level of your time series and then adjust it for Trends, Seasonality, and Special Events.
So next time you need to project Bank Holidays, Christmas, Summer holidays with real trending and produce savings to your organisation, think Forecast Pro. Stop spreadsheets sabotaging your business. Move to Forecast Pro from MXI UK.
The best way to see Forecast Pro is action is with your own data. Recently we launched a promotion where companies could sample Forecast Pro with their own data you find out more here: Forecast Pro
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In recent weeks we have worked with several companies who are using Forecast Pro and want to continue improving the forecast results from their time series data. Spanning the UK, Russia, Ireland and Spain each one of these customers had the same issues and so it a timely reminder of some facts.
Firstly they all recognised the strengths of Forecast Pro over Excel and its trendline data. Others were moving on from their ERP systems rudimentary calculations which are unable to interact with.
Even Forecast Pro sku forecast Software can't deliver immediate results. It takes time, trial and error is the best way forward in terms of planning. Once implemented take the time to learn your data and get to know the results. Be prepared to challenge the results. Consider separating data into 80 / 20 paretto analysis. Splitting some data into product/family (aggregating) levels and some at the SKU level can be effective.
Forecast Pro Top/down facility is very handy for people looking for a trend in difficult data. Isolating preferred SKU or categories is simple.
Another trend we notice amongst customers is over automation. Automatic forecasting relies on built-in features of forecasting software to choose an appropriate method for each of your time series. Like an automatic camera, automatic forecasting will work well in normal and normal circumstances. For difficult conditions, however, there is no substitute for your careful examination, judgement and expertise.
Lets face facts here you did not buy Forecast Pro to do the easy. So think John F. Kennedy, why do we want to do this, not because it is easy but because it is hard. Forecast Pro overide facility facility in the unlimited version and TRAC allows forecast overide. Human intuition, how else would we manage, ASH Clouds, Airline Strikes, Civil Service Go Slows.
So to recap, don't automate, don't expect immediate gratification, work the data, learn to use Forecast Pro and then you will reap the rewards indicated in the testimonials.
If you are not already on Forecast Pro try it out for yourself and see how it can help your company with our Forecasting Challenge. Read more: Forecast Pro
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Forecast Pro is a statistical forecasting tool which makes forecasting a manageable and fairly accurate and predicable exercise in UK and Ireland. Forecast Pro reads the times series data then using it's expert selector it selects most appropiate forecasting methodology automatically such as exponential smoothing, holt winters. Like most software products, you do not get maximum return on the product without some training and education. Successful Forecast Pro implementations are not realised overnight as it is a iterative process which requires much understanding of the data and the best ways to resolve forecasting difficulties. Forecast Pro is sold in the UK and Ireland by MXI. We know Forecast PRO which is why we offer the MXI challenge.
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With Foecasting and Forecast Pro overcoming these forecasting difficulties are best explained with some practical training. Part of the training would be to define a forecasting process for the organisation and document this so that all affected parties gain a clear understanding and appreciation of the process. Once you have this in place, the focus turns to the understanding of the data which is being forecasted and how Forecast Pro interprets this data. Forecast Pro will do all the hard work of doing the forecast for each item and then it's up to the user to iron out the data anomalies via their understanding of the model selection and search for a best fit forecast per item. There are many factors that affect forecasting like event modelling (weather, foot fall, population, sales promotions) so the understanding of the forecasting environment is key to its success.
We are MXI are accredited experts in the area of implementing Forecast Pro and have successfully helped clients to improve forecasting accuracy and supply chain. That's why we are running the Forecast Pro challenge.
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