Profound Business

“Never assume others in the organization automatically understand what you understand; develop clear tools to communicate information simply.”

One of the most common failures I see in organizations where responsibilities are divided by necessity due to sheer size is that a person doing a job assumes everyone else in the organization understands every aspect of that person’s job.

If that were true, would the organization need that person? Probably not.

My background is in forecasting - market forecasting, both long-term and short-term, as well as production forecasting. Production forecasting could be as simple as running a backlog report and saying “Here you go”, but that’s never the case. Real-world concerns like material availability and capacity constrain every forecast. So, how does one present this information in a manner that is easily understood?

I use a simple forecast template that I’ve developed and evolved at 3 different companies, plus my own side business. It’s simple, it’s easy to read, and it gets the job done. It takes me less than an hour on Monday to update it with changes from multiple reports that have relationships only a few people understand, and putting the data into a format that is easily understood by the team as well as showing the relationships between the data elements.

So, I’ve decided to make the template available for download. It isn’t some magical analytical tool to make you a better forecaster, it’s just a communication tool that you can change to accomodate your organization. I use all 3 tabs in this template in different ways:

Rolling 4-Wk Daily Plan

This is used to focus everyone, myself included, on what has to be done NOW. While every management guru tells you that if you plan well in the long-term you can prevent short-term issues, the real world is never that clean. You don’t want to miss a sale next week because you’re focused on next year’s sales.

Production Plan by Month

Of course, those management gurus ARE correct - quality planning prevents problems - just not all of them. But, you still have to do it or you’ll fail. Every week, I verify my backlog/forecast to be sure the prior week’s data was entered properly. Recently, I discovered a data entry error that would have led to a severe excess inventory problem six months from now. Every week, I go through my reports line by line and make sure I understand my forecast and production plan, and highlight any issues I foresee. It takes all of one hour, and the whole organization is on the same page.

Revenue Forecast by Month

As I worked with this tool, I started looking for ways to leverage the information for other purposes. The prime candidate was revenue forecasting, because the translation from units to dollars is real simple. In this tab, you only need to enter your identifier (part numbers) in the same order as they are listed in the monthly production plan, and enter the selling price per unit where indicated. The formulae do the work and you have a revenue forecast completed every time you update your unit production plan.

I included an instruction worksheet, but if something isn’t clear just leave a comment or shoot me a note from the Contact page. I’m putting this out as an unprotected sheet so you can customize it to your needs because I just don’t have time to customize the file for each person/company. Just be sure you save a backup copy of this file in case you need to re-start if something breaks.

  Simple Forecast Template (127 KiB, 434 hits)