Businesses should strive to become black belts at forecasting, constantly reviewing the processes they use and the technologies that can transform their capabilities. It’s that important! If you are the Sales VP, CFO, or a CEO of a company with shareholders or outside investors, missing your numbers is one of the most disastrous things to get wrong, especially if it is announced out of the blue. Investors and analysts like certainty and expect year-end results to be broadly in line with the guidance they received. So a missed forecast could lead directly to your share price plummeting or an angry investor at the other end of the phone. It’s hardly career-enhancing! Unfortunately, accurate forecasting is getting tougher by the day with disruptions, such as COVID-19 and the fallout from Brexit adding to the ever-present challenges of evolving technologies, increasingly volatile input costs, fickle consumer preferences, and upstart competitors. So which way do you turn? Undoubtedly adopting rolling forecasting is the best way of improving forecast accuracy and delivering timely business insight. But currently, many forecasting processes are decidedly inefficient with teams in individual business units downloading data from disparate enterprise resource planning systems, manipulating it in spreadsheets, and emailing their output to stakeholders in other downstream departments. Such processes are inefficient, error-prone and are rarely at the right level of detail needed to drive accuracy. They also take up too much managerial time to become routine. …