Predict Restructure

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Predict is an AI engine that flags potential anomalies in your financial data, and creates data-driven baseline planning with the power of AI. It is essentially your assistant that sniff tests your data to find anomalies resulting from formula-based errors, planning assumptions, or inaccuracies in the forecast. There are two major components in the Predict suite:

Predict Signals - Detects potential anomalies in your data and helps to resolve them.
Predict Projections - Forecasts your budget and forecast scenarios using predictive analytics.

The Predict AI engine trains on your Historical Actuals data and learns about your data trends, seasonality, and other statistical properties. It leverages these pieces of information which helps everyone involved in the planning process, from managers who need to generate a budget for their department to anyone who needs to review the overall plan and easily spot unnecessary spending and inaccuracies in the forecast, and leverage their data more effectively to drive better business outcomes.

Prerequisites

Here are some prerequisites that you need to have before accessing Predict. You can contact your administrator if you don't fulfill any prerequisites.

Three Years of historical actuals (36 months) is a minimum requirement for Predict Signals AI Engine to learn from your data. However, it is recommended to have 5-6 years of data for Predict.
Predict only enables fiscal year setups of 12 months period, any setup other than 12 months will not be supported.

Enabling Predict

You must contact your Account Manager or Planful Support to enable the Predict functionality in your application. Based on your request, the Account Managers can log in to your application and enter the passcode to enable this functionality, or if your Account Manager has provided you with the passcode, you can enable Predict by yourself.

Steps to Enable Predict

To enable Predict, follow the below steps:

Go to Maintenance > Admin > Configuration Tasks.
Select Planful: Predict from the list.
The Planful: Predict configuration page appears.
As per your need, click Enable Signals.
The Enable Predict popup appears.
Enter the passcode in the given text box and click Verify.
Follow the same steps to enable Projections.

Predict Signals detects and flags potential anomalies in your data and enables you to take corrective actions through data-driven insights. These anomalies could arise from typos, mistakes, erroneous formulas, or conscious changes in planning assumptions. It gives you a detailed context around each signal by using an intuitive graph and lets you collaborate with your colleagues and peers to make more informed decisions.

How Predict Signals Works

The Predict Signal's AI Engine, powered by machine learning and statistical/mathematical modeling, generates a predicted range representing the normal data ranges for a given dimension intersection. Any values falling outside of that range are tagged as Signals. These Signals are categorized as High risk, Medium risk, and Low risk depending on how far off they are from the predicted normal range.

AI Engine of Predict Signals

Predict Signals has a robust machine learning pipeline that handles the entire data science cycle, starting from data pre-processing to model deployment and management.

The Model Training phase in this ML pipeline is equipped with many time-series algorithms, statistical methods, and classical ML techniques with advanced ensemble and stacking methods to ensure consistent and accurate results. The Model Training time is optimized to a maximum extent using multi-threading and parallel executions. You cannot change the algorithmic settings for the Model Training as they are designed to adapt to varied customer data.

Advantages of Predict Signals

Predict Signals allows you to analyze scenario data, spot anomalies, and improve your projections’ accuracy by providing more context around the spotted signals. In addition, it provides a consolidated data analysis report on the dashboard, lets you collaborate with colleagues or respective owners of various data sets, and facilitates you to take corrective actions.

Timely identification of Anomalies: Signals could be displayed due to erroneous data entries like typos, mistakes in formulae, or fat-finger errors. Predict Signals helps in the timely identification of these anomalies and facilitates avoiding these expensive mistakes.
Efficient Planning: Makes work more efficient by helping you fix errors in time and by letting you collaborate with peers. It helps you customize your dashboard according to your requirements and view only the data that you deem necessary.
Collaborative Decisioning: If a signal is ever a result of a conscious change in planning, you can easily collaborate with your colleagues to take appropriate action.
AI-Powered Actionable Insights: Helps to turn your data into actionable insights and empower businesses to make data-driven decisions.

Predict Projections helps plan your budget/forecast scenarios in a data-driven approach as part of Structured Planning. Predict Projections generates future projections using Planful’s proprietary AI/ML algorithms through the Predict Projections AI engine. The futuristic Predict Projections enables you to quickly build accurate forecasts and budget scenarios backed by AI-driven financial forecasting.

How Predict Projections Works

The Projection's AI engine processes historical data from actual scenarios present in the system to understand the trend, seasonality, and statistical properties embedded in them by amalgamating standard AI Algorithms and Planful’s proprietary algorithms and techniques. It is built using a Human-in-the-loop (HITL) design that can take your annual budget as input and distribute the amount across the months of a fiscal year while adhering to the time-series properties found in the data by the AI engine.

AI Engine of Predict Projections

The Projection’s AI Engine is completely automated and off the shelf. You can use it like any other spread method in Structured planning. It is equipped with a robust AI pipeline that handles the entire data science cycle, starting from data pre-processing to model deployment and management.
The model training phase in this pipeline is built with many time-series algorithms, statistical methods, and Planful’s proprietary algorithms and techniques to ensure consistent and reliable projections. In addition, the model training time is optimized to a maximum extent using multi-threading and parallel executions. You cannot change the algorithmic settings for the Model training as they are designed to adapt to varied customer data.

Advantages of Predict Projections

Predict works as an intelligent assistant for all your planning and analysis requirements by helping you save time, and making you more efficient and accurate in a data-driven approach.

Efficient planning: Projections consider the historical trend and seasonality and potentially do better than formula-based planning in less time.
Reduced Cost: The number of planning resources required is reduced.
Increased business performance: With more data-driven planning empowered by AI, it generates more reliable projections for the business.
Augmented human intelligence: Projections allow users to moderate the AI-generated values for organizational decisions or exceptions without compromising on the usage of historical insights generated by the Projection’s AI engine.

FAQs

Get answers to all your questions and gain some knowledge of how Predict works in the Frequently Asked Questions segment.

How-Tos

Get a guided tour to perform key tasks in Predict through the instructional steps and help videos in the How-To segment.

Stay updated with the latest features and enhancements. Refer to the release updates page for details on our latest releases.

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What's Next

Setting Up Predict