Pronto Xi Advanced Forecasting

Applications Overview

Advanced Forecasting

Part of the Supply Chain application

Trademarks

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Copyright © 2023 Pronto Software Limited (ABN 47001337248).

Disclaimer

This document contains statements related to our current and future developments that may constitute forward-looking statements. They are subject to changes and may be available in a Pronto Xi 770 service pack or future release of Pronto Xi.

All diagrams, drawings, product screenshots and any other types of visualisations in this document, use demo or synthetic data created for display purposes only.

Advanced Forecasting

Optimise your inventory management with Advanced Forecasting, which enables you to accurately predict future demand for your products

Advanced Forecasting allows you to consider a number of different factors in your forecasts, such as entered sales orders, goods shipped and inventory transfers (usage). Using this data, the system identifies and tracks trends and seasonal fluctuations.

Appropriate smoothing factors are also applied based on a “best fit” method of forecasting. Algorithms include triple exponential smoothing (Winter’s Method) and moving averaging. With triple exponential smoothing, past observations are given exponentially smaller weights as the observations get older. This method provides more accurate forecasts when there are expected or known seasonal variations in the data.

Advanced Forecasting offers:

• graphical displays

• exception handling

• ability to expand on exception handling to include history linking and item linking

• trend classifications, including steady demand, seasonal demand, seasonal trends and averaging

• the ability to include service levels

• multiple calculation methods

Predict your future sales

In addition, Advanced Forecasting offers customer attribute forecasting, which gives you the ability to segment specific customers based on attributes – which, in turn, allows you to forecast based on attribute groups rather than specific warehouse locations. The forecast method can then calculate for each group and aggregate the demand at the planning level.

Advanced Forecasting’s sequencing functionality allows you to set up a series of generational requirements as a one-off task, then have them run periodically as defined. This enables you to spend less time preparing data and more time on the planning process.

For key market intelligence, the source is the best place to access this information. Advanced Forecasting’s contribution process functionality allows you to send data either internally or externally to be reviewed and updated, and then simply import it back. This reduces the risk of potential error.

Forecasting system

Your forecasting system should be understandable, flexible, simple to use, accurate, robust and integrated. Advanced Forecasting meets all of these requirements –and more.

Understandable

Advanced Forecasting displays calculated and manual forecasts within a chart on the same screen. This makes it is easy for you to determine how suitable any forecast method is for the pattern of sales of any item.

Flexible

Advance Forecasting gives you the option of daily, weekly, fortnightly, period, and monthly forecast periods.

You can take known market events into account, allowing you to smooth out unusual events from the past and account for anticipated events in the future.

Easily forecast a new item with no history by linking it to a similar item that has history.

Simple

Set-up and processing are relatively simple and can be automated.

Robust

Advanced Forecasting is underpinned by established statistical methods for forecast generation and selection.

Integrated

Advanced Forecasting is part of Pronto Xi’s fully integrated suite of solutions. As a result, the data used to calculate your forecasts comes directly from the Pronto Xi’s sales operations tools. Once the forecast is published, the results can be used by all the planning and reorder processes in Pronto Xi.

In addition, Business Intelligence (BI) Essentials contains a forecast model containing real-time information that can be used to enhance your reporting and strategic planning processes.

Trends

A trend refers to any general change in sales over time. Advanced Forecasting classifies trends in a number of ways, including:

• Steady demand – This indicates that the demand for the item is more or less constant over time

• Steady trend – This indicates that while demand may be increasing or decreasing, the rate of change of demand (the trend) is constant

• Seasonal demand – This indicates that, while demand may vary over time, demand is more or less constant for the same time period each year

• Seasonal demand with trend – This recognises a steady trend in sales superimposed over a seasonal demand

• Linear trend – This is an amount of increase (or decrease) that is the same over time

• Multiplicative trend – This is a percentage increase (or decrease) that is the same over time

Advanced Forecasting determines which of these trends is the best “fit” for each inventory item by creating a forecast based on each trend and then comparing them with measured (actual) demand.

Drill down and understand your statistics further

Measures of accuracy

Advanced Forecasting has the flexibility to handle items that do not lend themselves to traditional forecasting techniques. It uses three statistical analysis techniques are to determine the accuracy of the forecast:

• Mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) –The percentage by which the forecast differs from the actual sales achieved

• U-statistic – A comparison of the forecast with the “naïve” forecast (which only uses historical data for the short-term horizon forecasting)

• Tracking signal – a comparison of errors in a forecast over time to determine if they are systematic or random

Improving forecasting accuracy

To refine the accuracy of its forecasts, the Advanced Forecasting algorithm incorporates actual data as it becomes available. There are four key steps:

• Modelling – Advanced Forecasting develops a model of the sales pattern for each item to be forecast, based on trends, seasonality and random fluctuation

• Forecasting – Using the model, Advanced Forecasting generates new forecasts

• Feedback – Actual data is added when it becomes available to refine the model

• Performance – The forecasts’ accuracy is assessed to further refine the model

About us

We are an Australian developer of award winning business management and analytics solutions. Pronto Xi, our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, integrates accounting, operational and mobile features in a single system – optimising business processes and unlocking actionable insights. That’s why for more than 40 years, over 1,500 Australian and global organisations, across a wide range of industries, have trusted Pronto Xi to simplify their most complex challenges. With headquarters and our Development Centre located in Melbourne, we have support offices and consultants based across Australia, as well as a global network of Resellers and Solution Partners. Specialised business units within Pronto Software have the expertise to assist you with pivotal technology –Digital Transformation with Pronto Woven, Cloud and Hosting services with Pronto Cloud and Business Intelligence solutions with Pronto iQ. When you choose Pronto Software, you gain a team with deep industry experience, giving us the ability to understand your specific needs and build innovative solutions that drive business growth and revenue.

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