There are numerous considerations when a business looks at upgrading or acquiring an analytical solution. One very important capability is Put n’ Play predictive analysis. Assisted Predictive Modeling and predictive analysis tools should include sophisticated functionality in a simple environment that is easy for every business user.
Anything that can help your business users to understand, interpret and analyze data is a help! Users have many tasks to perform in a given day and while analysis may not be their forte, they definitely need clear, concise data to share, to make decisions and to see opportunities, challenges and patterns.
What did we do about planning and forecasting in the past? Well, a lot of what we did was based on guesswork. We might look at historical data and plan for growth that was unrealistic because it did not reflect the competitive market growth or the advent of online competition.
The simplest, easiest and spreadsheetble (I just invented this word) information which can be used for predictive and forecasting is defined data over a period. For example, date or time driven patterns which keep repeating till the cows come home. We will not discuss this here and hope you are relieved of some scepticism about this article at this stage.
