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Advanced Account Forecasting Setup
Set up and configure Advanced Account Forecasting to generate multi-horizon forecasts for manufacturing business processes. Configure the Advanced Account Forecasting and its related features, and configure their permission and security settings. Create a forecast set for each business area that requires forecasts, such as product category sales across territories, spare part revenue across service territories, inventory stocks across warehouses, and asset lifetime value across accounts. Define critical forecast configurations, such as measures, dimensions, duration, and adjustment periods. Use the Data Processing Engine to orchestrate forecast calculations based on multiple data sources.
Required Editions
| Available in: Lightning Experience |
| Available in: Enterprise, Unlimited, and Developer Editions |
- Permissions and Security Settings for Advanced Account Forecasting
Assign the required permissions to users to set up and use Advanced Account Forecasting. Create sharing rules to give users the required access to the forecasting records. Set field-level security to grant users separate levels of access to forecast values. - Manage Your Forecast Fact Object for Advanced Account Forecasting
A forecast fact object stores generated forecast values, such as forecast revenue and quantity. Each forecast fact record represents a set of forecast values for a combination of dimensions and a forecast set. The fields in a forecast fact object represent dimensions, such as account and product, and measures, such as opportunity quantity and forecasted revenue. The records in a forecast fact object are updated based on forecast set configurations whenever the forecast data calculations happen. Advanced Account Forecasting includes a predefined forecast fact object called Advanced Account Forecast Fact. To meet your business needs, you can add fields to the Advanced Account Forecast Fact object or create a custom forecast fact object. - Define a Dimension Source for Advanced Account Forecasting
Dimensions are qualitative attributes, such as product, region, customer segment, business unit, and inventory location, that group forecast data. In Advanced Account Forecasting, dimensions segment the forecasts that appear in the forecasts table. When you configure a forecast set, you can select the dimensions to be used in forecast set. To choose dimensions for a forecast set, first, you must define the source objects for the dimensions. For example, you can define Category as the source object for the product category dimension. - Define a Period Group for Advanced Account Forecasting
Period groups define the duration and the number of periods for which forecasts are generated and displayed. The duration of a period can be a week, a month, a quarter, or a year. You can specify the number of periods before or after the current period for which forecasts are generated. When you configure a forecast set, you select a period group to define the duration of the forecasts associated with that forecast set. You can use a period group in multiple forecast sets. - Create and Configure Forecast Sets for Advanced Account Forecasting
A forecast set represents a set of configurations for forecasts for a particular business objective. These configurations include forecast dimensions, measures, adjustment periods, calculation methods, and calculation frequencies. Forecast sets can vary based on business units, locations, product lines, or other factors. For example, a company can have two forecast sets: one on the sales demand forecasts for the Hammer product in Japan ship-to location and another for service revenue forecasts for the Forklift product family in the France location. - Data Processing Engine for Advanced Account Forecast Calculations
Advanced Account Forecasting uses Data Processing Engine to filter and aggregate data from orders, opportunities, sales agreements, location, product category, and custom objects. You can activate the out-of-the-box data processing engine jobs, or create and run your own by using existing templates. - Flow for Advanced Account Forecast Calculations
Use flows to orchestrate the end-to-end process of calculating forecasts. You can create flows that run data processing engine definitions to calculate forecasts based on sales agreements, orders, opportunities, or other records. To get started quickly, use the default flows that come with prebuilt apps or customize the templates based on your needs. You can also build a flow from scratch and add the invocable actions for Advanced Account Forecasting and Data Processing Engine to your flows. - Create Triggers for Advanced Account Forecasting Calculations
If you’re using custom advanced account forecast fact objects for your forecasts, you can create triggers to calculate forecasts for your accounts instead of using the CalculateAdvancedForecast invocable action in the flow. A trigger is Apex code that executes before or after specific data manipulation language (DML) events occur, such as before object records are inserted into the database, or after records have been deleted. - Define Custom Fiscal Years for Advanced Account Forecasting
If your fiscal year follows a different structure from the Gregorian calendar, you can define a custom fiscal year. You can calculate, roll over, and show forecasts based on custom fiscal years. You must define a custom fiscal year if you want to use the weekly forecast frequency. - Example: Generate Forecasts Across Multiple Regions with Advanced Account Forecasting
You can use the Advanced Account Forecasting feature to configure forecasts according to your business needs. To explain the flexibility that Advanced Account Forecasting offers, let’s consider the example of a business conglomerate spread across multiple regions. The company has a distributed account forecasting model where each region creates and maintains forecasts according to their business needs. - Service Revenue and Spare Parts Demand Forecasts with Advanced Account Forecasting
Use the Advanced Account Forecasting feature to shape accurate forecasts for service revenue and spare parts demand. To process forecasts, create custom forecast fact objects. Also, create data processing engine templates and jobs. You can then use these data processing engines in custom flows to generate accurate forecasts.
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