Finicast’s Ralf VonSosen and Nelson Chan were joined by LevelUp’s J.T. Cecchini and Peter Lee to talk about the latest in streamlining your Forecasting Analysis by going beyond traditional spreadsheets. 

Business is changing like never before, both externally and internally. Data volume is exploding, requiring people to think and work differently. This isn't something that can be solved by just staying up late and working longer hours, or having models that are more complex and take more time to compute, it's really a matter of thinking about it differently. 

Using only Excel does not align with today's rapidly changing business requirements. The limitations of a spreadsheet–even a portfolio of interconnected spreadsheets–do not keep pace with the accelerating change, data insight expectations, and exploding data volume of today's organizations.

Lack of Speed to Deliver

• Rebuilding models takes time
• Manual updates required in many places is time consuming
• Limitation on collaboration to collect inputs 

Lack of Flexibility to Adjust

• Challenging to add new business dimensions (products, regions, pricing, channels)
• Inability to reuse and adjust existing models
• Limitation on collaboration due to complexity and one-off nature of models

Lack of Confidence in Accuracy

• Manual entries
• Ensuring changes are made in all places
• Difficult to audit changes and revert to previous versions

Supplementing Excel with modern Business Intelligence tools like Tableau can be helpful in analyzing a large and complex set of data. These tools are designed to provide insights into patterns and exceptions that inform business decisions. Unfortunately, these tools cannot incorporate forward-looking assumptions to provide an intelligent forecast. That means that data needs to go back into Excel to leverage forecasting algorithms, which brings us back to the limitations of Excel captured above.

But, an advanced multi-dimensional planning and modeling platform like Finicast allows you to complete all your analysis and planning in one place, or import your business intelligence data for your planning.

Speed

• Build models for complex and high volume data sets with modern tools such as programmable pivot tables. 

Flexibility

• Incorporate changing business requirements by iterating and reusing existing models to add new dimensions and business rules.

Accuracy

• Minimize manual work and maintain control over your model with advanced versioning that includes the ability to selectively revert individual changes.

Tune into the webinar to learn more about how Finicast can help your business, and feel free to contact us with any questions. 

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