Top Business Forecasting Uses

Every organization wants the ability to peek into the future. That’s a superpower to see how you can increase profits or how you ensure your organization weathers the next storm (or pandemic).

Thanks for reading the transcript of the latest Beyond Transformation podcast from Beyond Key. Today’s episode discusses how to use business forecasting with Power BI. The video and podcast are clips from the business forecasting webinar on this topic.

During this episode, we discuss how to analyze trends and apply those to real-life scenarios in your organization. Thank you for listening to this podcast. If you’re interested in watching the webinar in its entirety, go to beyondinternet.com/webinar. Thank you very much. Enjoy the episode.

Business Forecasting Uses

Business forecasting uses predictive analytics to estimate an organization’s future. Not to say that we could have a crystal ball, but we’re using predictive analytics. We use tools that combine ideas like classification, decision trees, and machine learning to provide a more intelligent understanding of data.

The more data you have, the more you learn from ideas like text analysis and regression theory. The concept combines different ideas, and what you’re doing is the more data you have, the more you can have predictive analytics.

The idea here is that predictive analytics and forecasting are two sides of the same coin. You predict or forecast what happens in your company’s future based on what happened in the past.

Organizations use business forecasting to understand how their strategies should work in sales, marketing, finance, operations, and hiring situations. Business forecasting relies on trend analysis, mathematical models, and indicator approaches.

Business Forecasting Example

Let’s say you’re doing the hiring for next year, and you want to know how many people you need to hire. You review past hires from the last three years to help your departments thrive.

You load the data into Azure to connect to the cloud, so you have a backup of the information. One of the great things about using Azure is that it has AI and ML capabilities inside.

Some business intelligence tools allow you to turn data into intelligent insights. Using that, you could then start getting a better understanding of your data. Once you convert raw data from Azure, you can load it into Power BI to create a visual version of intelligent data.

If you realize over the past year, you hire five people for accounting and five for sales, but then you hire ten for operations, then you have to take a look, “Why is that? Why do we hire those people?” Those visuals can give you an idea of why that happened, and you start to get a picture of where you need to go with your hiring.

Business Forecasting Final Thoughts

If your organization needs help navigating the future, then business forecasting can help you. Contact us today to help your organization with its finances, sales, marketing, and operations.