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Spotlight of the Week: Top 3 Ways to Use Right90 Comparative Analytics

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

Why should you use Right90 Comparative Analytics — also known as the Analyze screen? The Analyze screen provides a rolled up view of your forecast by customer, product, region, or user in a table view.  While you have the option to drill down to see more details, you’re not bogged down with all those details. In addition to just viewing the forecast, here are three other popular ways to use Analyze:

  1. Use top-3-ways-comparative-analyticsyour snapshots to compare your forecast at points in time — for example, how has the 2010 forecast changed from the beginning of the year to today?  In this example, we’re looking at the variance by region.
  2. Compare top-3-ways-comparative-analyticsyour forecast to targets or goals so that you can keep track of how you’re doing against your objectives. In this example, we can see how each sales person is delivering against their targets.
  3. Compare top-3-ways-comparative-analyticsyour forecast to actuals or shipments to monitor attainment during the quarter. In this example, we can see attainment by customer.

Whenever you get a view of the data that you’ll want to see on a regular basis, save time by creating a Favorite. If you don’t have targets or actuals in Right90, your Right90 Administrator can help facilitate getting that data so you can take full advantage of Right90 Comparative Analytics to help identify and manage exceptions in your business.

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Spotlight of the Week: Copy/Paste Rows Special

Friday, July 2nd, 2010

Have you ever wanted to copy your run-rate forecast from the previous 6 months to the next 6 months? Or have you ever needed to copy forecast data from a similar product’s current quarter forecast to another product’s current quarter forecast? What if you’d just like to copy last quarter’s actuals data for a product to be the starting point for the next quarter’s forecast for that product?

All of these examples and many other requirements can be met with the Right90 “Copy/Paste Rows Special” functionality available on the Forecast screen. While a separate, more basic Copy/Paste row option enables you to quickly copy an entire row of data from one line item to another, “Copy/Paste Rows Special” gives you more advanced capabilities to copy and paste data selectively as well as for multiple lines of data. With this feature, you can:

  • Copy data from specific lines from one time range to another
  • Copy data from specific lines to different lines within a selected time range
  • Copy data from specific lines from one plan to another plan that’s at the same level of detail.

Here’s a simple example to help you get acquainted with this time saving feature. Let’s copy several months of forecast for 3 products to the same months for 3 different products. (more…)

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Spotlight of the Week: Managing More than One Forecast at a Time

Monday, May 17th, 2010

The Right90 Next Generation Forecaster provides many advantages for effectively capturing the forecast.  But what if you’re managing multiple views of the forecast like a production plan and a sales plan and you want the values to be the same in both places?  Many of you may consider using some of our copy features which would let you enter data in the production plan and then copy and paste those values to your sales plan. That works. But when you know at the time of the update (or judgment) that you’d like the change to be the same in both places, try the “Save changes across multiple plans” feature on the Forecast screen.

Managing changes across different plans

This option simultaneously copies current changes to other plans — which can save you valuable time and keystrokes.  A list of plans will appear in the pop-up menu that are at the same level of detail as your initial entry plan and are ones where you have authority to edit.  Simply save the changes to multiple sets of data all at once.

Depending on your company’s forecasting process, there could be many situations when it’s helpful to consolidate your updates across plans.  And don’t forget — you can include comments in Right90 with all your changes to provide additional context for others.

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Spotlight of the Week: Applying Advanced Filters on Your Data

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

Update forecast screen to show data on single pageOne of the more popular features in the Right90 Next Generation Forecaster is the ability to use advanced filtering beyond just searching and browsing your hierarchies. How can filtering help you? By getting you only the data you want to see on your forecast view. As an example, many forecasters and managers want a view of the forecast for a specific time horizon and to filter out any opportunities that have no revenue impact for that time frame.

To take advantage of advanced filtering, first update the forecast screen so that you have all your rows of data on one page. (Page size options are dynamically determined in Right90 and can be selected under the “Update” screen.)

If you find you still have too much data to fit on one page, you can reduce the amount of data you’re viewing three ways:

  1. Narrow your search — by selecting a particular person’s forecast or a certain geography
  2. Reduce the length of time that you’re viewing — from 2 years of forecast to 6 months, or less
  3. Remove the quantity, price or revenue columns – if they are not needed.

Apply a data filter to your forecastOnce you have all the data on one page as you like it, select the “Filter” option in your menu across the top. Fill out the pop up screen (including the details under “More Options”) and hit “Apply” in the bottom right corner.

After applying your advanced filters, you can even take it one step further – group your data to view an even more manageable set of data on your screen.

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Spotlight of the Week: A Simple Way to Evaluate the Quality of Your Forecast

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

Measuring forecast accuracy is one of the most popular ways to measure the quality of your forecast.  However, we’d like to suggest some other simple but very valuable analyses you can do to help build confidence in your forecast data.  At a minimum, knowing when the forecast was last updated will give you an indication as to how good the data is.  We’re not talking about the date the forecast was “due” to be updated by the sales team but rather the last time a particular opportunity changed. This is one way our customers determine how complete their forecast is.

On the Right90 Forecast screen, there are two key “viewable” fields that help you understand if your forecast is complete:

  • “Last forecasted date” field tells you when the quantity or price for that particular line item was last forecasted
  • “Last updated field” tells you when anything else associated with that line item was updated (i.e. the stage of the opportunity, market application, or other custom fields you have set up).

Before analyzing “last forecasted data” results, we have two more tips for streamlining your view and maximizing the functionality available in the Next Generation Forecaster. First, when you have your forecast data on one page in Right90, filter out zero revenue rows to reduce the amount of unnecessary data. Try filtering revenue greater than zero for just the current month. Then, sort by clicking on the “last forecasted date” column header to bring the older items to the top so that you can focus on items that may not be up to date.

Obtain a quality sales forecast using filtersIn the example to the right, you can clearly see that quantity and price forecast updates were made in January 2010.

As both a forecaster and a manager, reviewing when the forecast was last changed helps you quickly spot areas that may need a second look.  Catching outdated information along the way will help build confidence in your forecast data and improve your forecast accuracy.  Have you used these techniques to evaluate the quality of your forecast, or do you have another favorite technique to share?

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