Sales forecasting is a critical business function that influences decision-making across procurement, production planning, and financial management. However, many organizations still rely on Excel spreadsheets for their sales forecasting processes. Studies show that over 70% of businesses still use Excel for forecasting, despite its limitations. Additionally, research indicates that organizations using manual Excel-based forecasting experience up to a 30% decrease in forecast accuracy, leading to supply chain inefficiencies and lost revenue.

While Excel is a familiar and versatile tool, it presents several challenges that hinder efficiency, accuracy, and collaboration. Manual data consolidation, excessive email exchanges, and outdated information often result in significant inefficiencies.

Challenges of Traditional Sales Forecasting in Excel

1. Time-Consuming Data Consolidation Sales teams and planners maintain individual Excel sheets, requiring extensive manual efforts to aggregate data for full visibility and analysis from multiple sources.

2. Collaboration Bottlenecks Emailing spreadsheets back and forth makes it difficult to track changes, leading to version control issues and misalignment.

3. Data Staleness and Inaccuracy Forecasting spreadsheets often contain outdated data that does not reflect real-time enterprise sales or backlog information, causing erroneous projections.

4. Limited Visibility and Governance Business leaders lack a centralized view of forecasting data, making it difficult to enforce governance and ensure data integrity.

How Boardwalk Velocity Transforms Sales Forecasting

Boardwalk Velocity is an innovative platform designed to overcome the inefficiencies of spreadsheet-driven sales forecasting. By leveraging a structured, collaborative, and real-time environment, Boardwalk Velocity offers a seamless transition from manual spreadsheet processes to a more scalable and automated solution. More importantly, by putting data in Velocity, organizations unlock their data from Excel, making thew data machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) ready. This allows companies to harness advanced analytics, predictive modeling, and automation to drive better business outcomes.

Key Benefits of Boardwalk Velocity

1. Unlocks Data for AI & ML By moving data from Excel into Boardwalk Velocity, organizations can leverage AI-driven insights and ML-based predictive models to enhance forecasting accuracy. This enables better demand sensing, scenario planning, and strategic decision-making.

2. Accurate and timely forecasts driven by Boardwalk Velocity increase top line revenue by 3-10% and improve margins by reducing obsolete inventory by 2-4%.

3. Automated Data Consolidation Boardwalk Velocity integrates directly with ERP, CRM, and other enterprise systems, automatically pulling in the latest sales and backlog data. This eliminates manual aggregation efforts and reduces errors.

4. Real-Time Collaboration Unlike Excel, where updates are delayed due to email exchanges, Boardwalk Velocity enables multiple stakeholders to work on the same dataset in real-time. Changes are tracked and visible to all relevant parties, ensuring

5. alignment across teams.

6. Always Up-to-Date Information The platform syncs with enterprise data sources, ensuring that forecasts are always based on the latest sales figures and backlog data. This significantly improves forecast accuracy and responsiveness to market changes.

7. Enhanced Data Governance & Security Boardwalk Velocity provides role-based access controls, audit trails, and centralized data management. Business leaders can define governance rules and ensure compliance while maintaining a single source of truth.

8. Integration with Existing Enterprise Systems Organizations can seamlessly connect Boardwalk Velocity with their existing ERP, CRM, and supply chain management platforms. This integration enables continuous synchronization of data across the enterprise.

9. Scalability and Efficiency As businesses grow, managing sales forecasts through Excel becomes increasingly cumbersome. Boardwalk Velocity scales effortlessly, accommodating large datasets and complex workflows without sacrificing performance.

10. Works with Existing Excel Models Unlike other solutions that require a complete overhaul of existing forecasting processes, Boardwalk Velocity works seamlessly with the Excel models’ users are already familiar with. This ensures a smooth transition with minimal disruption, allowing users to leverage their current spreadsheets while benefiting from enhanced automation and collaboration.

Why Boardwalk Velocity is Better Than Point Solutions

Many sales forecasting tools exist as point solutions that attempt to replace spreadsheets entirely. While these tools provide structured workflows, they often require users to adapt to a completely new system, leading to resistance and a steep learning curve. Additionally, many point solutions lack flexibility and struggle with integration into existing enterprise environments.

Boardwalk Velocity, on the other hand, provides a hybrid approach—offering the familiarity of Excel with the power of enterprise-grade automation and collaboration. Unlike rigid point solutions, Boardwalk Velocity:

· Enhances rather than replacing existing processes, reducing user impact.

· Integrates seamlessly with current enterprise systems for real-time data accuracy.

· Ensures scalability without sacrificing flexibility.

· Enable collaboration without losing the ease of working in spreadsheets.

· Unlocks data from spreadsheets to enable AI-driven forecasting and automation.

Conclusion

Boardwalk Velocity offers a game-changing solution for organizations struggling with inefficient, spreadsheet-based sales forecasting. By automating data consolidation, enabling real-time collaboration, and ensuring access to the latest enterprise data, businesses can significantly enhance forecasting accuracy and decision-making. More importantly, transitioning from

traditional Excel-based forecasting to Boardwalk Velocity unlocks data for AI and ML, providing a pathway to intelligent automation and predictive analytics.

Embrace the future of sales forecasting with Boardwalk Velocity and transform the way your organization plans, collaborates, and executes strategic decisions.