In early 2010, ForecastRx founder, William Lovett, began tossing around the idea of creating an automated and accurate purchase order creation tool that could outperform spreadsheets and many existing ERP systems. Able to leverage the experience he had growing up working for his family business, a Tier 1 supplier of suspension parts for Chrysler, Will began working on what would become ForecastRx.
Recognizing that accurate and expedient demand forecasting and inventory planning is vitally important for the success of a business, he knew that the application must take advantage of the latest forecasting technology as well as account for a multitude of different purchasing variables. Differing lead times between vendors, individual product seasonality, new product introductions, and legacy product phase-outs were all critical to stock order performance and were too much to handle with the combination of his business’s existing ERP system and spreadsheets. He knew ForecastRx would have to address these issues competently. Since its inception, the application has continued to evolve to make the lives of business-owners and purchasers easier by handling all of these challenges, and more.
Much of the inspiration for the constant evolution has come from you, our users. The team at ForecastRx has documented all the suggested features and improvements from our clients. After constant communication between users, product specialists, and the development team, we have designed a completely new interface to help clients overcome the challenges of inventory forecasting. This update added advanced functionalities, in addition to improving the UI and general workflow.
The primary goal that we centered every modification around is ease of use and intuitiveness. We understand how busy our users are, and procurement can consume a significant portion of time that could be better spent in other areas of a business. What good is the being perfectly stocked if you don’t have time to market your product line? Our new features and functionalities not only make inventory management a lot easier and more accurate, but they also minimize the amount of time it takes to make accurate and intelligent purchasing decisions.
Here are some of the most significant modifications in more detail:
New Item Cards
ForecastRx allows you to view Detailed Performance Metrics based on your most recent sync. View 7-day, 30-day, 90-day, 365-day, MTD, and YTD historical sales for any item you choose. Next to these metrics, you will find a section containing info about future projections based on your forecasting parameters and settings. We developed the Item cards so you have one centralized spot where you can view all pertinent purchasing information for any product in your catalogue.
Suggested Purchase Orders
The Suggested area of Purchase Orders is where ForecastRx offers suggestive, pre-filtered, vendor-specific purchasing recommendations based on your latest forecast results. We suggest you process these items within the current horizon to avoid running out of stock. We also gave you the ability to analyze and modify our suggested item inclusions, quantities, and prices. These changes can be made here prior to launching the improved PO Wizard or exporting your results to a CSV.
Shipping & Receiving through Amazon
Here, you have the ability to keep track of shipments Amazon has received and reconcile those inbound shipment quantities against your purchase orders and third-party warehouse inventory. The ‘By Shipment ID’ area of Receiving is where ForecastRx offers you the ability to reconcile shipments received by Amazon from drop ship purchase orders or warehouse inventory quantities, in addition to the ability to reconcile purchase orders to shipments received by Amazon or to your warehouse.
Advanced ways to Modify a Products Sales History
Throughout the development process of our latest redesign, we listened to clients who requested easy ways to modify items’ sales histories. We implemented three modification tools in one place that help users account for previous stock outs, promotions, or other identified data anomalies, as well as leverage sales history of a phase out item for it’s replacement.
- Manual Override – By simply modifying the aggregated data within the grid, you can adjust the values that ForecastRx uses to feeds our algorithms
- Copy History – Allows you to copy one item’s history to another item
- Backfill – For items that have sales history between one and three years, ForecastRx can back populate data, mirroring sales history year over year, in order to force the algorithms to recognize seasonal trends more quickly and with less data than they normally would need.
As part of the New & Improved ForecastRx V2, we would like to present you with a Limited Time Special Offer. If your a business owner that uses Amazon Seller Central, QuickBooks, Excel or other accounting software, come try a 30-day Free Trial (No Credit Card Required).
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