In the current business climate, with labor costs asymptotically approaching zero (how much cheaper can sweatshop or prison labor get?), the ability to find and capture some residue of margin is increasingly depends on either innovation or process-tightening. Since most organizations are incapable of significant innovation, tightening processes is generally the way to go. For businesses that depend on effective In the current business climate, with labor costs asymptotically approaching zero (how much cheaper can sweatshop or prison labor get?), the ability to find and capture some residue of margin is increasingly depends on either innovation or process-tightening. Since most organizations are incapable of significant innovation, tightening processes is generally the way to go. For businesses that depend on effective sales forecasting and an efficient supply chain, refining demand forecasting can be a fruitful method of increasing margin without trashing wages or pimping quality. The software giant in the demand forecasting and supply chain management arena is John Galt Solutions, and the company’s entry level package is a desktop client, ForecastX Wizard, that’s available as a discrete item or as part of a bundled Forecast Xpert Toolkit that sports a textbook and hands-on training.I didn’t examine the textbook, but I took them up on the training, which turned out to be effective and well-executed. The software is a vast add-in to Microsoft’s Excel product, as significant and crisply designed an add-in as I’ve ever worked with. As a rule, add-ins throw a handful of features into the spreadsheet, but ForecastX seems more like a complete, stand-alone product than an extension of Excel. An analyst working with the wizard-based product goes through a series of steps, starting by importing data that defines the past, a baseline “history” against which to project a forecast. The analyst then uses the Wizard’s intrinsic routines to model forecasts against the history. The system supports varying levels of sophistication and complexity in the baseline, depending on the demand management challenge, but the holy grail of the defined output is always the lowest possible Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), the average of the deviation between each point in the time series against the actual. For different challenges (mature product versus new offering, intermittent or seasonal products, and so on), the Wizard will apply different model-building tools and different statistical methods. The Wizard’s interface doesn’t choose these for an analyst — that part of the intelligence either comes through previously-acquired knowledge or through the available training or textbook. ForecastX’s interface is laid out as well as an Excel add-in can manage. The simplest methods for forecasting, such as applying an average and moving on to projecting a simple trend-line as a baseline, are very accessible. As you refine your forecast to achieve a better (lower) MAPE through experimenting with seasonality, planned events (such as promotions), and unplanned events (such as natural disasters, you will get faster at producing functional forecasting results by iteratively issuing audit reports, examining them, refining methods, and re-running forceasts. You can also make use of the intrinsic Procast feature, a method that runs everything in the toolkit at the history in a variety of ways and synthesizes a best-fit solution. As you might expect from a significant analytical product that’s arrived at a version 7.0, there’s a lot of depth to the features, and depth can be the enemy of a smooth interface. The John Galt team have done a good job of adding features without ratcheting up the complexity, but the result isn’t perfect. At times a button was used when a tab was required, but a regular user of the package won’t melt down. In fact, the Microsoft Excel design team could learn a half-dozen lessons in sensible menu and option structure from the ForecastX team. Calculation speed was not an issue in any problem I ran (not the most complex, by any means, but non-trivial).For organizations with more sophisticated requirements, and those looking to harvest more margin by improving demand management and smoothing out their supply chain, John Galt Solutions offers an enterprise forecasting suite, the Atlas Planning Suite. ForecastX Wizard 7.0 Price: $895 per workstation Platforms: Requires Microsoft Excel Verdict: Organizations just getting started with automated forecasting solutions should take a close look at ForecastX Wizard, as should those looking to upgrade their forecasting chops a notch or two. However, if your organization is making a significant effort to build new capabilities through demand management, it will require a larger set of supply chain planning tools than this inexpensive, well-designed desktop analytics solution claims to deliver. Technology Industry