Prophecy™

The right methodology

Use Prophecy™ if you're forecasting with:

1. Frequent and highly variable promotional activity.
2. Active competitors, with equally frequent and variable promotional activity.
3. Promotions which are (intentionally) different each time
4. Promotions which occur at different times each year.
5. Major customers represent a high proportion of total sales.

Prophecy™ helps forecasters interpret and understand the factors that statistical algorithms struggle with, by presenting the data in a variety of intuitive, graphical and insightful ways.

Prophecy also features an optional Trade Promotion Planning module, which allows itemised promotions to be planned, modelled, approved and evaluated.

Aimed at the right users

Prophecy™ is for front-line business sales forecasters. It helps them productively apply their specialised knowledge and judgement to the sales forecasts.  All within an easy-to-use, Excel type experience. However, Prophecy™ goes way beyond Excel in its specialist analytic and sales forecasting features.

Prophecy™ is a 'live' view of detailed volume forecasts through revenue and profit. It consolidates in real time over multi-level hierarchies of products and customers.

The forecasted measures in your Prophecy™ system are completely customisable. Start with volume, extend to revenue and margin, compare with budgets, plans, other versions.

Integrate forecasting into core processes

Prophecy™ offers you much more than just volume sales forecasting.
 
Standard costs and selling prices are pre-imported into the database (or prices and discounts can be modelled manually). The revenue and profit impact of volume and pricing changes are instantly aggregated in real time over a complete hierarchy of products and customers.

Forecasts can be analysed and 'risk-assessed' within Prophecy™ at any hierarchy level for volume, revenue, profit or any other forecasted measure.

Prophecy fully supports 'forecast / review / re-forecast / publish' workflow.

Track progress vs. Plan, Last Year, Last Version...

Prophecy™ elegantly implements control, visibility, tracking and sharing of the sales forecast. Escape the 'many versions of the truth', bloat and data fragmentation issues associated with Excel sales forecasting spreadsheets.

Forecast, analyse, compare with budgets, prior years or previous forecasts - for volume, revenue, profit or any other measure.  All within Prophecy's easy to use, multi-dimensional views and graphs.

Every Prophecy report acts as a forecast data entry screen, supports hierarchical drilldown/up over products or customers, live graphs, back-solving, unlimited undo/redo and many other forecast productivity aids.

Capture and audit every forecast change in the Prophecy Tracking database - date, time, who made the change etc..

See all this and more in action via our online demo.

Measure Sales Forecasting Accuracy

Accuracy analysis is important because:

• Forecasters will learn from forecasting errors and avoid repeating the same mistakes.
• Management will spot which forecasts need reviewing, earlier.
• Forecast accuracy stays 'front of mind' for forecasters when it is easily visible to managers.

Accuracy analysis is hard to deliver in fixed-view sales forecasting spreadsheets.  Prophecy™ gives you accuracy data at any level of hierarchy and over any time horizon, with summary statistics like MAPE, MAD, two types of weighted average and over/under frequency distributions.

Prophecy™ quantifies the added value from judgemental forecasting, by comparing the published forecast with the statistical forecast that would have been generated using the available sales history.  Click here to see a sample output.

Technical Benefits

The software runs on Microsoft Windows 7 or newer clients.  It hosts its data in a shared MS SQL Server database MS SQL Server database. It supports concurrent, multiple-user, read-write access without 'sub-cubes' or individual spreadsheets and real-time, maintenance-free consolidation.

Adding new products, customers and sales history is a breeze.  Use the Prophecy Database Manager application's "write once, use many times" automation module to maintain Prophecy.