Business Intellegence / Forecasting

[William James McEachran]

On Thu, Aug 26, 2004 at 01:46:18PM -0400, Walter Vaughan wrote:
> FilePro is excellent with nice precise math. On the other hand, has 
> anyone done anything that is more fuzzy in nature, i.e. predicting the 
> future?

I learned filePro when my family ran a chain of 35 gas stations.

Gasoline sales are extremely cyclical -- huge seasonal variations at some
locations, others pretty steady. They also vary by the day of the week (yes,
Friday is the heaviest volume).

I had a filePro program, that looked something like a spreadsheet, that
predicted volume sales per location on a daily basis for the next 14 days.
This was used to manage the inventory in-the-ground.

As I recall, I looked in the sales records for the location for the same
day-of-the-month (1st Monday in June etc) in previous years and did some
kind of simple averaging.  It was very simple mathematically.

The resulting number was then modified by a contant for the site that was
held in a control file field. This let us adjust for unexpected things like
road construction.

And finally, the Buyer could override the produced numbers using his experience
and knowledge of current conditions (is the retail price rising?/falling?).
This let him play with "what-if's" a couple weeks ahead (a long time with
gas stations which turn over inventory quickly).

If the Buyer wanted a key press would restore the calculated numbers.

It worked wonderfully. We had extremely tight inventory. The program would take
the actual opening inventory each day (from "dip" records created on site, 
input into Windows filepro and ftp'ed and automagically input into the Linux
box) apply pending deliveries and projected sales and make a damn good guess
at the inventory levels for the next 2 weeks. 

-- 
Bill McEachran