Analyzing Forecast Accuracy
What’s the best kept secret in your company? Well, hopefully not your forecast accuracy numbers? Forecast accuracy should not be a calculation that happens behind closed doors. But the numbers should be communicated and analyzed to be really useful. Here are three ways you can communicate and analyze your numbers:
- The table of shame & glory: One good way to display forecast accuracy is to collect the numbers in a heat map. Collect the numbers for different organizational units in a table and color code the values based on tolerance ranges (green = acceptable, yellow = hmmm, red = absolutely not). The advantage of this approach is that we can easily spot trends and also compare different organizational units. This type of table can also be used to motivate people to take their forecasts seriously. But once again: be cautious with putting too much pressure on forecast accuracy.
- The bar chart of absolute truth: You can also simply compare forecasts and actuals in a simple bar chart. This type of format works ok for a single organizational unit. Having more than one in there makes a messy chart that is not worth looking at. The advantage here is that we can easily spot the absolute differences between the values.
- The run chart of truth: A very popular way to display the forecast error is to visualize the percentage error in a bar chart (a so-called run chart). This is a great way to very easily spot problem areas and trends. Also, we can easily compare different organizational units.
Those are three great ways to analyze and communicate forecast accuracy. You will probably want to experiment with all three of them. Many organizations do use these in connection.
Good luck with your next few forecasts! If you want to learn more, please join one of our upcoming Rolling Forecast workshops. Simply get in touch with me for an updated schedule.
P.S.: If you want to read more about measuring forecast accuracy, I highly recommend purchasing Future Ready by Steve Morlidge and Steve Player. It is one of the best books about business forecasting. You can read an interview with Steve Morlidge on this site.
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