Does any one know of an Add-on to do Sales Forecasting so that a 6/12 monthly forecast can be created & then tracked. Attain would need to look at the History of each customer to get down to inventory items & quantities bought & when. Then put into system like a budget to see actual sales against forecast sales at a later date. Would need to be able to adjust the forecast as this would be used as a guide to decide what to manufacture when, as well as manually account for seasonal trends.
While this might be a bit of a leap, Usage Based Procurement will allow you to input information such as this. Out of the box, it tracks past history for a period of time and will then allow you to make adjustments to those quantities based on specific issues that might be encountered during those previous time frames. With that said…and some code tweeking, one could change it to where the user puts in desired forecasts as well. On second thought…it might just be easier to create your own.
Nice recovery, Bill. The second thought wins. Because there are multiple methods generally accepted in forecasting, it is doubtful that there is a Navision add-on. If you attempted to write a forecasting model, you have go from the simple to the sophisticated. You would need to include moving average models, curve fitting (straight line, quadratic, exponential, growth), intermittent demand and discrete data models, multiple variations on exponential smoothing, and Box-Jenkins models. In order to satisfy the power users, you’d also have to include capability to handle regression, event models, census and multiple item forecasting. We are in the process of integrating a third party forecasting package with Navision 3.60. If you have some suggestions regarding what type of data an end user might wish to retain for comparison or tracking purposes, feel free to contact me directly.
Thanks for your help Bill I’ve been told Avanti in NZ have done something like this as an Add-on, so I’ve sent off an email to Greg Simmons there Thanks
I had the opportunity of developing a customized forecasting solution about 6 months back with funcs specs from one of Big 5. It was forecasting plus dispatch planning and input point were essentially sales orders and weekly,monthly, quarterly forecasts. Forecast accuracy, performance also were integrated with periodic discounting. You can mail me for furhter details if required. Amit amit_alt@yahoo.com