Business Intellegence / Forecasting

[Alan Mazuti]

I wrote a program many years ago for oil heat delivery that used the
degree day system.  In short you input the temperature each day and it
would project out when you should make the next delivery. 

Alan Mazuti
-----Original Message-----
From: filepro-list-bounces at lists.celestial.com
[mailto:filepro-list-bounces at lists.celestial.com] On Behalf Of William
James McEachran
Sent: Thursday, August 26, 2004 10:03 AM
To: filepro-list at lists.celestial.com
Subject: Re: Business Intellegence / Forecasting

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
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