The Volume Forecast

The volume forecast is a prediction of how much business is going to be done at a future date. The Forecast Planner predicts weekly business volumes by day of the week based on

  • Large samples of historical, actual volume data
  • Configured forecast rules
  • Adjustments to the predicted volumes for special events such as promotions and holidays

The volume forecast is a major component used to generate the labour forecast. For example, the number of transactions forecasted at a register drives the requirement for the number of cashiers that need to be working, the number of items forecasted to be sold in the bakery drives the requirement for the number of bakers on a given day, and so on.

Volume forecast components

Business drivers help to forecast future business volume and labour requirements. A driver is any item or unit that can be measured and tracked. Volume drivers are the source of the volume forecast.

Volume Drivers use actual site recorded data – such as POS data, patient census data, devices that count the number of customers entering a shops, pallets and boxes, and so on – to track units that vary according to the volume of the organisation's business; for example:

  • Sales dollars/pounds
  • Number of customers
  • Patients
  • Number of items sold
  • Number of transactions by cash, cheque, credit card, and so on

Dependent drivers are affected by changes to the other dependent drivers in a forecast category. If you edit the volume forecast for a dependent driver, the system updates the volume forecast for the other dependent drivers by the same percent. Non-dependent drivers, by contrast, are not affected by changes to any other drivers.

For example, if Sales, Items and Customers are dependent volume drivers, then if you edit the number of forecasted sales for the bakery, the system changes the forecasted number for customers and items for the bakery accordingly. These new totals are rolled up into the categories above the bakery; for example, to the shop. One driver can be used again and again in different categories. For example, the business driver Customers can be defined once and then used for all appropriate forecast categories.

Special events, such as sales promotions, changing seasons, public health emergencies, and snow storms, have an impact on the volume forecast. Special event markers indicate days with volume that is probably out of the normal day-to-day range. When the Forecast Planner encounters a special event, it calculates the percent impact of the event and compensates for the impact when it generates the forecast.

Adding special events is a way to fine-tune the forecast by layering the trends from past events with current trends.

For example, some holidays autumn in a different week each year. When determining the effect of those holidays, the Forecast Planner looks back to dates marked with the name of the event, because it cannot rely on information from the current date of the holiday.

Another example is forecasting the day after a holiday. A given holiday may have an impact beyond the day itself. The Forecast Planner goes back to actual day-after-the holiday data, rather than relying solely on data from any Friday in the past.

The Forecast Planner can also dismiss data for anomalies, such as storms, when volume is absent or extremely high or extremely low.

You can designate a special event as Seasonal; in this case, the event impacts only the traffic pattern, and not business volume.

For details, see Special Events