So for a forecaster Excel is actually quite a powerful tool and is regularly used. Some people may perceive Excel as a basic tool, and it’s a piece of software that comes with any computer and kids can use it, et cetera, and often it’s sometimes got a bad reputation as being quite basic and compared to online fancy piece of software and it’s like, oh, Excel, why would you use that?
In forecasting, Excel is very powerful because it’s very flexible. It’s easy to develop and build forecast models in Excel, and it’s ubiquitous. Everyone’s got it. Forecasting – a lot of it is about compliance, particularly when you go to a lot of stakeholders. So something like an Excel, which everyone feels comfortable with, which is on everyone’s computer makes the compliance a real positive and really helps enable compliance.
There are quite a few online forecasting tools out there which push people away from Excel and the actual forecasting of entering assumptions, building the algorithms, and looking at the outputs sit in online tools. What you tend to find is people still forecast in Excel. They do it in Excel and then cut and paste information into these online tools, which immediately means you lose a lot of the transparency because you don’t see all the calculations that are going on in Excel offline. You just see the final outcome and forecasting. You want to be able to dig in and understand drivers and have good transparency, and if ultimately you can’t see all those calculations and inputs that are driving it because they’ve been done Excel and then pushed into an online tool, then you lose that. We’re actually aware of some online tools out there where they have the functionality to export to Excel and import back into Excel because this is people’s behavior. So Excel is a powerful and important component of the forecaster toolbox, for one of a better word.
Excel has these benefits of being flexible and powerful, but at the same time it does have challenges. Imagine if you’re forecasting for a product which is just about to launch in 40 countries, so that’s a immediate 40 different Excel files. And then imagine you’re doing your base case and then a high and downside, well, that’s 40, 120 files. Then imagine you’re doing that for 20 brands, you’re in thousands of files, so if you’re working in Excel, it does have challenges, but our view at J+D Forecasting and Evaluate is – don’t solve challenges and create new ones. Don’t get rid of Excel and put in an online platform and force people to change fundamental behavior, but utilize other technology and software to wrap around the Excel so that the Excel can continue to be a useful and important component or software in the forecaster’s toolbox, but use other software and technologies to overcome the challenges, if you just focus on Excel, thereby you’re solving problems and not creating a whole load of new ones.
Excel is a powerful tool for ad hoc analysis as well. As a forecaster. you might be looking at data, transforming data, deep diving into data, mashing data together, doing all sorts of stuff. So Excel is a great tool for that, and by having forecast models in Excel, you can then blend those additional ad hoc calculations that are taking place into models. You can integrate and you can centralize it and you can really ensure that you have that transparency from Excel-based model through to the underpinning calculations that are driving that as well.
