AI Driven Sales Forecasting Without Sacrificing Excel

Sales forecasting is a critical business function that influences decision-making across procurement, production planning, and financial management. 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. Organizations using manual Excel-based forecasting experience up to 30% decrease in forecast accuracy and supply chain inefficiencies leading to revenue loss.

Challenges of Traditional Sales Forecasting in Excel

Time-Consuming Data Consolidation: Sales teams and planners maintain multiple Excel sheets, requiring extensive manual efforts to aggregate data from multiple sources.

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

Data Staleness and Inaccuracy: Forecasting spreadsheets often contain outdated data that does not reflect real-time enterprise sales, causing erroneous projections.

Limited Visibility and Governance: Business leaders lack a centralized view of forecasting data, making it difficult to drive consensus and ensure data integrity.

How Boardwalk Velocity Transforms Sales Forecasting

Boardwalk Velocity is an innovative platform designed to overcome the deficiencies 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. By putting data in Velocity, organizations unlock their data for AI—enabling machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities for advanced analytics, predictive modeling, and automation.

Key Benefits of Boardwalk Velocity

Unlocks Data for AI & ML: Organizations can leverage AI-driven insights and ML-based predictive models to enhance forecasting accuracy, enabling better demand sensing, scenario planning, and strategic decision-making.

Accurate and Timely Forecasts: Boardwalk Velocity increases lead time accuracy by 5-10% and improves margins by reducing obsolete inventory by 2-4%.

Automated Data Consolidation: Integrates directly with ERP, CRM, and other enterprise systems, automatically pulling in the latest sales and backlog data, eliminating manual aggregation from disparate sources.

Real-Time Collaboration: Multiple stakeholders can work on the same dataset in real-time. Changes are tracked and visible to all relevant parties, ensuring alignment across teams.