Fundamentals of Forecasting

Forecasting is critical to the functioning and success of every business, from small companies to giant corporations. In this hands-on seminar, you'll discover the basics you need to assemble data and build forecasts that help power the operations, finance, production, and planning functions in your organization.

You'll master the foundational vocabulary and skills to create forecasts on your own, and you'll learn to translate and appraise the forecasts of others. In addition, you'll understand how to interpret the meaning of any forecast, whether it's your own company's or that of the competition. Whether you're new to forecasting or simply in need of a briskly paced refresher, this seminar will help you see into-and plan-your company's future!

Note: Please bring a laptop with Excel installed to this seminar.

What You Will Learn

• Gather the basic facts necessary to start building a forecast
• Limitations-what forecasts can and cannot do
• Choose the proper forecasting technique given available data and forecast goals
• Critique and interpret forecasts and their implications
• Utilize powerful MS Excel tools, with uses transferable to other disciplines
• Master and use regression tools to make better forecasts
• Use Excel tools to present forecast data to executive management

Audience

• Any financial professional who needs to create, maintain, and improve the forecasting process at his or her company
• Professionals in any function who must interpret, analyze, and make decisions based on forecasts created by others

Prerequistes

Course Outline

1. Introduction to business forecasting

2. Basic statistical techniques

3. Forecasting techniques and methods

4. Getting started: Making underlying assumptions

5. Identifying data patterns: Exploratory analysis concepts

6. Time series and their components

7. Using Excel as your forecasting tool

8. Forecasting performance measurements

9. Simple and multivariate linear regression

10. Summarizing and displaying data in Excel

11. New directions in financial forecasting

Course Labs