Video - InEight Control - Time Phased Forecasting

TRANSCRIPT

Projects are typically overwhelmed by escalating forecast values as the project progresses. Sometimes what the business thinks they're going to spend doesn't end up being very accurate at the end of a project. One way to mitigate this is to take the forecast and break it down into more consumable, estimate-related time block periods.

This prompts the project engineers to think about what activities, bills, and costs are going to occur in smaller, more mentally digestible time periods.

To activate time phasing, navigate to the control settings.

Let's flip the switch to on for both forecasting and time phase forecast to live forecast. The forecasting switch simply turns on the time-phased forecasting, while the push to live forecast updates the live forecast in the CBS with the modified values in time-phased forecasting.

You can access time-phased phase forecasting by selecting your predetermined CBS item. After selecting a predetermined cost item, from the Actions dropdown menu, select Time Phased Forecasting. The Time Phased Forecasting page appears.

One of the key goals of time-phased forecasting is to see how you are forecasting to spend allocated money and focus on the monthly buckets to better understand what is going to be spent. You can then determine how accurate your forecast is versus the actual spent within that period and, if desired, pushed the forecast into your live forecast.

The Time Phase Forecasting register allows you to auto spread across time periods, which are based on cost curves and start and end dates. You can also manually override specific months and change the distribution cost. The Auto Distribute icon allows you to have the system automatically allocate remaining forecast as determined by your start date, actual finish date, and cost curve.

The allocation of dollars will begin on the start date and stop allocating on the finish date month. On the right side of the screen, a blue circle appears by the forecast quantity when a manual override to the forecast is performed. If you hover over the blue circle, it shows a description of the manual override.

On the left side of the screen, a manual override to the forecast quantity shows a warning symbol by the cost curve. Hovering over the warning sign shows that the cost item contains a manual change to the time phase months. Thus, the cost curve is no longer accurate. In the case of time-phased forecasting, the type of cost curve being used determines how forecasts will be spread across each of the monthly forecasting buckets.

Once you are comfortable with the new values, select the Publish button to publish your new values to the live forecast if desired. All changes made within time-phased forecasts are captured in the audit log within the control workspaces. The audit log captures many changes made to a forecasting CBS item.

Under the Data Type column you can see any time-phased forecasting changes along with their associated attribute, change by, and change dates. You can also view the before and after values. In this video, we discussed how to use time-phased forecasting and push those values to your live forecast.