Operational Traffic systems typically produce booked business status reporting such as a 6 week, or 6 month "projection" report by a variety of criteria (dimensions), such as by salesperson, or advertiser, or product codes. These operational reports provide no real forecast of what your ongoing bookings will finally invoice, only what is currently booked for the future. A Forecast of your future business needs to come from formulas and models, (possibly using past pacing), that realistically calculate the future expected values such as unsold inventory, invoice revenue, etc, and add these to your current booked business. One simple example of this approach is to multiply unsold capacity by your historical average rate and add this to booked business (and there are many other, more sophisticated models which can be used).

By knowing in advance where your business is heading, using facts rather than instinct, allows Media decision makers to consistently interpret their future business situation with more clarity earlier so that actions can be taken to exploit, change or correct the future outcome. Decision making is simplified because forecasts can be easily compared to the expected or budgeted results or to historical performance, for example, "are we forecasting being oversold?". Consequently, we strongly recommended the inclusion of trusted forecasts (using formulas that have proven reliable for your business) to the standard reporting to simplify decision making.

BIAnalytix is a data warehouse and business intelligence system from Decentrix which includes all the advanced tools necessary for powerful forecasts to be based upon past pacing performance and to include the resulting exception analysis for a powerful media BI system.