Program Overview:

Strengthen your forecasting skills to analyse financial data and develop robust forecasts.
In this hands-on seminar, you’ll delve into the critical components of forecasting and build forecasts that help power the operations, finance, production, and planning functions in your organization.

You’ll master the key components and skills to create forecasts and 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 or seasoned in forecasting and in need of a briskly paced refresher, this seminar will help you see into—and plan—your company’s future!

How You Will Benefit

• Gather the basic facts necessary to start building a forecast
• Learn 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

Program Objectives

By attending this workshop you’ll learn:

• Introduction to business forecasting
• Basic statistical techniques
• Forecasting techniques and methods
• Getting started: Making underlying assumptions
• Identifying data patterns: Exploratory analysis concepts
• Time series and their components
• The use of Excel® as your forecasting tool
• Forecasting performance measurements
• Simple and multivariate linear regression
• Summarizing and displaying data in Excel®
• New directions in financial forecasting

Extended Seminar Outline

Learning Objectives

• Identify the Basics of Forecasting
• Describe Quantitative and Qualitative Analyses
• Apply Statistics and Formulas to Forecasting
• Define Data Analysis Using Microsoft® Excel
• Identify Business Forecasts, and Know How They Are Used
• Describe How Probability and Risk Affect Forecasts
• Describe Future Trends in Forecasting

Day One

• Forecasting Definition
• Why and How to Forecast
• Forecasting Needs Analysis and Data Collection

Day Two

• Quantitative Analysis
• Applying Statistics and Formulas
• Microsoft® Excel

Day Three

• Using the Power of Excel
• Financial Analysis: Sales, Production, Costs, and Cash Flow
• Probability and Risk
• Future Trends in Forecasting

Who should attend?

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

Special Feature
NOTE: Please bring a laptop equipped with Excel 2010 to this seminar.Preferable that candidates does have a basic working knowledge of Excel

Total Duration

3- day