Contributors: Ruvisha Pillay, Bill Tonetti

Planning with spreadsheets can be cumbersome. They are difficult to maintain, often have data quality issues, and time spent preparing them reduces the time that’s available for actual planning. Pivot Forecasting greatly reduces your reliance on spreadsheets. However, it does not eliminate them entirely, nor should it. Pivot Forecasting can actually create them, using data from your inventory app, and applying world class business planning methodologies, mathematics and analytics!

Information can be extracted from Pivot Forecasting in the following ways:

In this article, we aim to explore these options.

Sheet panels all have an export button above them (down-arrow Excel). Panel exports output the exact data that is contained in the panel, into Excel. They are formatted easily. You can export from any detailed or aggregate view.

Pivot Maps® are useful for comparing data-streams. For example, the Pivot Map below gives you a view of the deviations between forecasts and actual demand during the previous month. The size of a rectangle represents the volume of the product; and the colors represent the magnitude of the deviations. This is useful to highlight areas for possible improvement. In the below example, the big blocks of red in the Cooktop section would be a good place to start investigating. You can click on any box in a Pivot Map to navigate directly to that item, and then you can easily use the back (left arrow) button on your top button bar to return to your initial node on the Tree.

The Excel formatted export from Pivot Maps includes all of the visualized data. It will show the actual history and forecasts from last month, plus the variances. This output is easy to sort and the information is very useful for your sales and operations planning process.

You can export to tabular or cross-tabular CSV files via the Tree Menu. You can also export from the Top Menu, which will export all items in the model. This is the same as using the Tree Menu on the All Items node.

CSV files in Pivot Forecasting are much more scalable than reports. Spreadsheet exports have to load the whole workbook into memory, while CSV exports page data as it’s exported so they can handle large amounts of data.

Tabular CSVs are the most versatile. In a History or Future CSV export, the output will include all of the attributes and all historic or future measures. They are useful for creating pivot tables within Excel..

If you are not looking to create pivot tables, you could export one measure at a time using the Cross-Tabular CSV-exports. They are not quite as versatile as Tabular CSV exports, but they are simple to work with. Like the tabular-CSV-exports, cross-tabular exports include all attributes, so they can be easily grouped or sorted.

Administrators have access to create reports. They can then grant report access to other users and those reports will appear on users’ Top Menus. They can also be scheduled by the administrator for automated distribution to any list of emails..

Most reports are simple to make using the embedded report builder. Reports are exported to Excel workbooks. They can use filters, and they can be based on summarized data.

Pivot Forecasting helps companies to eliminate error-prone and difficult-to-prepare spreadsheets. It makes it very easy to output important data to facilitate a world-class planning process.

Have you read the related articles? Check out our Pivot Forecasting collection!