What are Opinion Lines?

When creating a final adjusted forecast, planners will often want to consider multiple opinions. Examples of valuable opinions are:

• A statistical demand forecast generated using historical sales data, such as the forecasts generated by ForecastX
• A sales leader’s projection based on opportunities that have not yet closed
• A marketing team’s projection for new promotions that will drive direct to consumer sales
• A demand forecast provided to you by an important customer

In ForecastX, we represent each unique point of view about future demand with its own opinion line. The Opinion Lines Manager enables team collaboration on a single forecast. Here you can create the opinion lines you want to be involved in the collaboration process. These new opinion lines will appear in the Standard Report beneath the statistical forecast opinion line that ForecastX generates by default. Once created, these additional opinion lines can be populated in several ways: manually typing in values, using the Forecast Adjust function, or importing values from a file.

ForecastX can also generate blank template files for each opinion line. These files are intended to be shared with collaborators, who can independently complete them and send them back to a planner. For example, a file for a sales leader and a file for a marketing leader. These collaborators do not need ForecastX software to complete and return the template. 

These collaboration features may also be used to carry forward opinions to a future forecast. For example, manual adjustments made in a report generated last month can be copied to a new report generated this month.