Business Intelligence – “What if” forecast cost analysis

What if analysis in business intelligence allows you to simulate how a change in plan can affect your long term costs. What we have done in Daxeam is we have added the Proposed work order costs (maintenance forecast) to the cube. You have always been able to run multiple forecasts and see what it suggested. But you were never able to analyse the cost or dig deeper into how it affects your bottom line. Until now…

How to set it up and run it…

1. Create a meter budget – conditions could have changed that you are now running 100km per day rather than 50km per day. This means that your truck is due for a service a lot sooner.

2. Create a maintenance forecast plan that uses the meter budget created.

Make sure to tick the flag “Include forecast cost”.

3. Run your maintenance forecast for the new plan.

4. Process your cube

5. Analyse your data in Excel connecting to the cube.

Slice and dice your data with the following relationship.

A typical budget for next year might be your proposed work order transactions amount + previous year Ad Hoc work order actuals (Work order type is Ad hoc). You can get an instant report rather than having to manually create your own data in spreadsheets etc.

Run a number of what if type scenarios to see how your increased/decreased usage of your assets affects your maintenance costs.