BI Forecast

Forward-looking inventory planning built around your data.

BI Forecast helps teams move beyond static reports and spreadsheet-based planning by turning sales history, seasonality, and inventory position into forward-looking forecasts and recommended inventory actions.

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WOS Comparison – What-if scenarios to test inventory levels by month

Plan Inventory Before Problems Show Up

Inventory planning gets difficult when teams are trying to forecast demand, manage on-hand inventory, account for lead times, and identify risk across hundreds or thousands of items. Our BI Forecast brings those inputs together so teams can see where inventory is headed and act before stockouts, overstocks, or missed sales become larger problems.

Anticipate Demand

Use item behavior, sales history, and seasonality to estimate future needs.

Manage Inventory Risk

Compare demand against current inventory, target inventory, orders, and lead times.

Prioritize Action

Focus attention on the items, exceptions, and recommended buys that matter most.

From Item Behavior to Inventory Action

Our BI Forecasts do more than display data. They study how each item performs, project future demand, and compare that demand to inventory, helping teams prioritize the actions that matter most.

Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4

Understanding Each Item

The BI Forecast starts by studying how each item actually performs. The system gets a “feel” for each item by studying how it performs. Is it price sensitive? How seasonal is it? Is the selling sporadic? Is volume high or very low? All of these criteria are taken into account when the system determines the appropriate model.

This helps the system avoid treating every product the same, even when items within the same category behave differently.

Sales Curve Profiling – measuring seasonality
Each week, the system reviews historic sales trends and determines the appropriate level to assign the seasonality for each item. Does that short-sleeved shirt sell like all the other short-sleeved shirts, or does it look like it’s on a different trajectory? The system is smart enough to make the proper adjustments.

Forecast Model
Items are grouped by behavior such as promotional activity, volume, consistency, seasonality, and price sensitivity, allowing the system to begin forecasting sales.

Projecting Future Demand

Once the BI Forecast understands an item’s selling pattern, it can project future demand across upcoming months. The tool can use historical sales, seasonality curves, lost sales adjustments, and forecast methods to estimate annual potential and month-by-month demand.

Teams can compare system-generated forecasts with retailer estimates, internal forecasts, or manual inputs, then choose the estimate that should become the live forecast.

Forecast Sales Estimates
Shows how projected demand can be broken out by month, giving teams a clearer view of future sales expectations.

Forecast Scenarios
This enables the user to apply conservative, moderate, and aggressive “what-if” scenarios to determine what will happen to inventory levels by month in each case. Each item can be assigned different levels within the conservative, moderate, and aggressive criteria.

System vs. Retailer Compare
The tool set allows the user to compare the system-generated forecast, an alternate forecast (from Retailer, or another internal department, etc.), and a manually entered forecast against each other. They can then select which of the estimates they want to use for each item as the “live” forecast.

Compare Demand to Inventory

BI Forecast compares projected demand against the inventory position the team actually has, including on-hand inventory, on-order inventory, lead times, target on-hand levels, and weeks-of-supply goals.

This gives teams a clearer view of where inventory is likely to fall short, where it may be too high, and how inventory levels change over future months.

Recommend Action

The tool helps users focus on the items that need attention first. Alerts can flag exceptions like forecasts that are significantly higher or lower than recent sales, items above or below target on-hand, future stockout risk, and other inventory issues that would be difficult to find manually. 

Point out exceptions, such as items where the forecast is significantly higher or lower than the last 52 weeks’ sales, items over or under target on hand, etc. Easily adjustable using filters

Built Around the Way Your Team Plans

BI Forecast can be tailored around each client’s data, planning rules, reporting needs, and decision process. Teams can customize the views, fields, KPIs, time frames, and planning parameters that matter most to their business.

  • Customize columns, KPIs, filters, images, and time frames
  • Set lead times, WOS targets, minimums, overrides, and business rules
  • Build planning views around the way your team actually makes decisions
  • Review past performance, current inventory, and forecasted annual potential together

More Than a Forecasting Dashboard

Many tools can display sales history or show a forecast. Our BI Forecast is different because it combines ERS’s retail and wholesale planning expertise with item-level forecasting logic, inventory rules, and action-oriented outputs.

Item-Level Intelligence

BI Forecast studies how each item behaves instead of applying the same generic logic across every product.

Inventory-Aware Planning

Forecasts are connected to real planning inputs like on-hand inventory, open orders, lead times, target inventory, and weeks of supply.

Action-Oriented Outputs

The tool does not stop at showing numbers. It surfaces exceptions, identifies inventory risks, and helps teams move toward recommended actions.

See Our BI Forecast in Action

Watch the Demo

Watch this walk through of the key BI pages for Item Performance and Forecasting. Contact Us to learn how to test out our tools.

Talk to the Experts

ERS has over 20 years in helping companies turn inventory faster, forecast more accurately, and deepen their visibility to sales. We do this through engagement and providing fully customized tools.

Smarter Tools.
Smarter Planning.
Better Results.

Everything you need to plan and manage inventory except the heavy price tag.

CONTACT US TO LEARN MORE

full customizable

The integration of the ERS POS backend, ERP and Microsoft’s PowerBI enables almost limitless views.

baked in expertise

Takes advantage of both human and AI powered intelligence.

fast and accurate

The heavy lifting is done on ERS servers so user interaction is swift.

deep visibility

Views of the pipeline, estimated sales, recommended buys, item performance and more.

Learn About Our Other Inventory Solutions

Go to Inventory Solutions