There are three basic strategies for working with others to establish the final forecasts—(1) sharing a single stand-alone project, (2) using Forecast Pro’s Excel Collaboration facility to incorporate forecast adjustments made in Excel and (3) consolidating multiple projects into a “super project” using the Super Project Manager. There are pros and cons to each approach.
Sharing a stand-alone project is a straightforward way to work with one or two other individuals to establish the final forecasts. Using this approach, the forecaster begins by creating forecasts for all items that need to be forecasted, enters any desired overrides and saves a forecast project—often to a network drive. The project can then be opened by anyone using Forecast Pro (Forecaster or Collaborator licenses) to review, make changes, etc. If there is a third individual who needs to review the project, that person would do so after the second individual has updated the project. Only one person at a time can access the standalone project, so the changes must be performed sequentially.
Forecast Pro’s Excel Collaboration functionality allows you to create “Forecast Pro Collaboration Spreadsheets” which enable members of your team to view and modify your Forecast Pro forecasts in Excel. Any forecast overrides and comments created in Excel can then be imported back into your Forecast Pro project. This process allows multiple individuals to make changes simultaneously, allows you to define what items each individual has access to and allows the individuals to work in Excel rather than Forecast Pro. The pre-formatted collaboration spreadsheets support numeric and graphical display of the history, forecasts and overrides, and include automated item-lookup capability. The Excel Collaboration Manager in Forecast Pro allows you to easily manage the collaborative forecasting process by providing the import/export capabilities and maintaining a record of all collaboration spreadsheets associated with your Forecast Pro project including their current status.
Finally, the super project approach allows you to break large forecasting jobs into smaller Forecast Pro component projects that can be worked on separately within Forecast Pro and then consolidated into a “super project.” This process allows multiple individuals to make changes simultaneously, allows you to define which items each user has access to and allows the users to work in Forecast Pro. To implement this approach you first create, forecast and save separate component projects and then use the Super Project Manager to combine the component projects into a super project that allows you to view and manipulate the consolidated forecast. A Super Project can only be created by someone with a Forecaster license, but it can be used by anyone using Forecast Pro (Forecaster or Collaborator licenses).
A forecasting process that shares a stand-alone project or uses the Excel Collaboration functionality is much simpler to implement and maintain than one that uses a super project. The primary difference between using a super project and using Excel collaboration is that when using the super project approach the collaborating individuals are working in Forecast Pro and when using the Excel collaboration approach, they are working in Excel.