Traffic Forecast Tool

An introduction and guide to the Traffic Forecasting tool

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What is it?• The Traffic Forecasting Tool aims to provide an accurate traffic forecast over the next 13 weeks at a unit level, by day and by traffic stream.

• Using this you should be able make plans for periods of high traffic, or for low traffic and allowing higher annual leave levels and greater absorption.

• The tool is designed so the forecast data can be copied directly into the Indoor Workload Tool to prevent having to rekey the data.

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• The traffic forecast is based upon -• Budgeted traffic of the forecast weeks• Adjusted by the cumulative traffic variance by stream• Split over the weekdays using a 4 week rolling average by stream by day

How it works

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Visual Guide• The tool uses traffic data downloaded from a server to keep the forecast as up to date as possible• When opened the tool will check to see if there is any new traffic data available to download and automatically update itself to the latest forecast weeks.

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Visual Guide• When used for the first time the region and unit will need to be selected, any region and unit can be selected from the single file• If you save the file to your computer you won’t need to reselect your unit each time.

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Visual Guide• The tool forecasts the next 13 weeks of traffic.

• Along with how the traffic is likely to be distributed throughout the weekdays

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Visual Guide• Should you know of any planned bulk mailings coming into your unit (sky mags, Tesco clubcard statements, etc) you can enter a manual adjustment to any of the streams on the IWT Daily Split page.

• You can also use this to make any corrections to the figures if the budget is missing a specific stream, for example in week 17 below Special Delivery is showing no traffic.

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Visual Guide• The IWT Daily Split sheet shows detailed information for the 13 forecast weeks

• To the right of the detailed data is the manual adjustments box for making any corrections or additions to the streams.

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Visual Guide

• On the right we have entered the Special Delivery traffic correction, as you can see the figures entered in the manual adjustment move over into the detailed week figures.

• We also know we’re going to get a bulk posting come in on Tuesday, so we’ve entered 10,000 large letters into the adjustments and the corresponding figure has increased by that amount.

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Indoor Workload Tool

Visual Guide• The traffic is now ready to be copied into the Indoor Workload Tool

Copy

Paste values

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Visual Guide• The tool comes with a forecast accuracy page, this shows how closely the tool managed to forecast the traffic in the current week.

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Visual Guide

• In this example the top part shows the forecast the tool would have made for week 9.

• Beneath the forecast are the actuals as reported by Business Warehouse.

• At the bottom are the percentage variances, overall the forecast was 1.8% out.