Today's quick tip: Optimizing a forecast

Do you have a site or activity with low or sporadic patterns in contact volume? This useful feature applies an additional forecast optimization to reduce the effects of rounding during average volume calculations and can improve the accuracy of your forecast.
Optimization can be set at the folder, activity, site, or enterprise model level, and the selected settings will automatically apply to subordinate (child) sites, activities, and folders unless changed. The on-screen message indicates whether the activity inherits optimization from a parent activity or site.

When should I apply optimization?

This optimization modifies the basic forecast function by performing a reconciliation routine to minimize the difference between the rounded average and the numerical average. If you have activities with low or sporadic contact volume, optimization can help with over forecasting volumes, allowing you to dictate how the volume averages are rounded. For example: one call in a single interval over a 2-week period would result in an average of .5 of a call, which would normally be rounded up to a 1. This would assume that call would occur EVERY week in that interval, increasing the volume forecasted.

How do I apply optimization?

Navigate to Settings > Enterprise model > [select level] > Forecast targets and defaults tile > Set up forecast defaults.

In the Forecast optimizations section, select Click here to optimize different parts of the forecast.

Click Optimize.

In the pop-up window, select the Minimum number of contacts to preserve (default is 0; options are 0–10). This value is a ‘floor’ value, telling the system to never go BELOW that value due to rounding.

Select the appropriate rounding function. Options include: 

• Normal floating-point rounding rules: This is the default rounding rules.
• Always round up to the nearest integer: If resulting average is.49 of a call or below, it will still round up to 1. This may not apply in most scenarios.
• Always round down to the nearest integer: If resulting average is .99 of a call or below, it will always round down to 0. This is the true benefit of the optimizer. Unless the calls are consistently occurring in an interval, it won’t reflect the volume.