WHITEPAPER ROI From FORECASTING

zy Vanguard Software
CORPORATION

Advanced-analytic forecasting + Advanced workflow design = ROI across the enterprise

The Promise of Forecast Accuracy:
Operations, Finance, Sales/Marketing

Every management team strives to get the most out of the money and effort
pumped into various investments. Question is: which parts of these investments
will drive the biggest, and surest, returns?

Take corporate IT spending. It???s no secret that companies large, small, and across industries

are betting very large sums on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. This makes sense.
ERP has evolved beyond the manufacturing arena to become the operational and transactional
backbone of the modern enterprise. Despite this impressive evolution, returns on investment
in ERP systems remain notoriously low for lack of one fundamental enabling technology ???
advanced-analytic forecasting.

Leading-edge firms get this.???A best-of-breed forecasting system is almost
We posit that increased forecast accuracy adds more self-explanatory,??? writes Bryan Ball, senior expert for Aberdeen Group.
value to enterprise management and financial Aberdeen conducts and publishes research on supply-chain management
returns than any other technology investment. and information technology. ???It's no surprise that best-in-class start
Research analysts and ERP consultants support this with the best (forecasting) tools they can find, whether part of their
stance, describing advanced-analytic forecasting as ERP or best-of-breed.??? The underlying precept here is that among

the ???essential building block,??? the ???keystone,??? and the all possible IT investments, increased forecast accuracy is the single
???comerstone??? of enterprise performance improvement. biggest (and surest) driver of direct savings, revenue, and total return
on investment.

Let's see how it plays out across three major functional areas: Operations,
Finance, and Sales/Marketing.