FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 1, 2002

NEW VERSION OF FORECAST PRO UNLIMITED ADDS COLLABORATIVE FORECASTING AND GREATLY IMPROVES EASE OF USE

January 1, 2002, Business Forecast Systems of Belmont, MA has released Forecast Pro Unlimited Edition Version 4, a complete revision of the popular Forecast Pro Unlimited package. Forecast Pro Unlimited is used by businesses of all sizes to forecast such things as product sales, revenues and demand for services. Forecast Pro Unlimited can be used as a stand-alone solution or integrated with production planning, supply chain management, inventory control or other planning systems. The new version supports collaborative forecasting, sports a new more intuitive interface and offers many other substantial improvements.

Forecast Pro Version 4 is a state-of-the-art statistical forecasting package that uses artificial intelligence and powerful methodology to yield unsurpassed forecasting accuracy. In expert selection mode, Forecast Pro Unlimited uses a rule-based expert system and proprietary statistical algorithms to analyze data, select appropriate forecasting techniques and create forecasts. This allows users with little or no forecasting experience to use the program effectively. The expert selection algorithm is extremely accurate—a fact confirmed by Forecast Pro’s first place finish in the largest and most comprehensive forecasting study ever undertaken (see press release dated October, 2000).

Forecast Pro Unlimited includes a wide variety of forecasting techniques to accommodate all types of business data. Methods include exponential smoothing, Box-Jenkins (ARIMA), Croston’s intermittent demand, low volume models, event models (for forecasting promotions or business interruptions) and multiple-level (hierarchical) models. The program also provides a complete array of supporting features including graphical displays of forecasts, on-screen adjustments, multiple forecast overrides, model descriptions and statistics, customized reports and much more.

Forecast Pro Unlimited Version 4 improves upon its predecessor in many ways. According to BFS Vice President, Eric Stellwagen, “This is a major new release and the improvements are truly too numerous to list. One fundamental change is that you can now share your forecasting session with colleagues and work together to establish the final forecasts. This collaborative forecasting capability is critical for many companies and is normally only found in large-scale planning systems that cost at least 10 times more than our software. Another major improvement is a navigation bar with synchronized views that allow immediate access to all relevant information.”

Forecast Pro Unlimited reads data from spreadsheets (Excel and Lotus), ASCII text files or directly from a relational database via ODBC. Users can specify the content and format of the output data and reports. Command line operation is supported, allowing easy integration with ERP, MRP, EIS, and SCM systems. Like the other BFS products, Forecast Pro utilizes FpwLib.dll, a forecasting library separately available to qualified software developers who want to incorporate the BFS methodology in their own products.

Forecast Pro Unlimited runs on Windows or NT platforms. Minimum requirements include 32 megabytes of RAM, and 15 megabytes of available hard drive space.

This product list price is $4,995.

Contact: Eric Stellwagen, Vice President
617 484-5050
e-mail: estellwagen@forecastpro.com