We’re currently investigating the usefullness of a seperate forecasting module to complement the ERP system. This means another piece of software to be implemented and serviced.
I know that BO does not offer any sophisticated statistical functions , but perhaps someone has ventured to do some advanced reporting on , for instance , sales data to discover trends etc. I recall the previous function to decrease lows and highs in a series of data. Or such things as classifying products in terms of them being fast-running articles or slow ones.
Forget BO, what about your database? Certainly if you are on Oracle there are lots of lovely new functions which do all kind of crazy things. I haven’t got access to the document - or even BO at the moment but this might be worth a look…
I checked with BO about the analytic applications. They started with giving me a rough estimate of costs…(end of conversation)
I can not think of a single analytic application running within a 200km perimeter, apart from the occasional multinational with bucks to spare…
I don’t know how in depth you want to get with this…but we did use Business Objects reports to show Key Performance Indicators. This information was indeed used for forecasting. We set up a lot of this year vs last year, this month vs last month, expected growth rates. We did this for multiple countires, multiple currencies…
It was in my past life, so I think I have some hard copy of the reports and graphs, but I’m quite sure I don’t have anything “electronic”.
I won’t even scare you with what we managed to do with Excel for forecasting, what if analysis, etc.
Everything is truly welcome (surely a presentation),
I’m trying to avoid another piece of software, which I believe may very well not be beneficial in the end. I’m just trying to research what is possible with the means at hand (DB2 7.1, Powermart , BO) and if someone came across this issue before.
It should go deeper than just comparing the totals of two succesive years, cause that is standard reporting. More thinking about the way a product behaves, stock-comparisons , input from salesmanagers…
Do you want to give some specific examples of what you need? If we have that you may find a lot of us have already “been there, done that” and would be happy to share. Just give me a bigger picture of specifically what you want to do…
Perhaps I should give you more of a background to my issue.
We currently employ a forecast module called SPI (Sales purchase inventory) It is build around an ETL tool from Informatica, uses DB2 as a storage medium and Excel as front-end.
The process is basically as follows:
Data is extracted from the ERP system and stored in historic tables.
Periodically data is transfered to Excel using VBA import scripts and displayed in huge sheets (2000 rows, 200 columns)
The responsible sales managers looks at data concerning stock levels , prior sales data and purchase orders (stuff we get from Japan) in advance for 6 months.
Based on this mass of data he has to give an estimate how much he thinks he will be selling for several months in the future.
The excel file is returned to the purchasing department, who export the new estimates to the DB2 historic tables.
The whole process is very, very complex and the accuracy relies on the skills and the input of respective salesmanagers.
What we lack is input , based on the relevance of data (mainly sales data) itself. Too much depends on the human factor and forecasting should be much better to satisfy demands.
I can think of such things like linear extrapolation to predict sales for coming months based on sales history, but I do not wish to start re-inventing the wheel. Possibly people have dealt before with these issues and used RDBMS functionality or some clever construction with BO to work out statistical models to sort perhaps to behavioral patterns, working in season influences.
I have no working knowledge of such products as set analyser or the data mining tool and if they could perhaps be of some use. But if I can accomplish anything worthwhile using a BO product, I can perhaps eliminate the need for yet another foreign tool…
This is so strange it’s almost scary! This is exactly what we had mapped out our strategy to do…using Oracle!
Rather than doing a great deal of the forecasting using Business Objects, we were planning on relying on Excel to do a lot of the computation because that was the environment that the users were accustomed to doing their forecasting in.
I’ll see if I can locate so of the documents that we put together and I’ll email you offline.
I do remember that we had information like growth rates that they plugged into Excel so that we could report what the numbers would look like if they had this rate of growth with the level of profit margin. There was also a method of reporting future investments, new stores and such.
Perhaps there is an equivalent to the ‘soulmate’ which works at the corporate level.
(I had a flashback of a Robin Williams film; “What dreams may come” , concerning the concept of soulmate’s, but that is just my passion of film popping up now and then)
We used a combination of BCA/VBA and excel in the past to do some pretty nifty statstical calculations to be included in BO reports as BO did not provide the statistical capabilities required…
Remember when version 5 came along they’d added a a few new functions, such as Odd(), Even(), Multicube() and the Euro conversion functions? Wonder what V6 brought with it…I’ve just had a quick look and spotted one or two but nothing really on the stats side of things. Oh well…I guess thats not what the tool is for.
(BOB member since 2002-09-04)
(BOB member since 2002-08-15)
(BOB member since 2002-07-10)
(BOB member since 2002-08-15)
(BOB member since 2002-07-10)
This is exactly what we had mapped out our strategy to do…using Oracle!
(BOB member since 2002-09-04)
(BOB member since 2003-05-12)