Enterprise-wide sales forecasting made possible

The challenge

Thomson Reuters provides news, legal and tax & accounting products for industries, corporations, and governments across the world. Operating in both a global and highly localized industry, maintaining a strategic view of company and product performance presents a significant operational challenge.

As a dynamic and acquisition-focussed business, Thomson Reuters relies on multiple sales systems, making the consolidation of an enterprise-wide sales pipeline & forecast a highly manual and effort-intensive process.

Analysis of the sales pipeline and forecast for strengths, weakness, and movement had been restricted to segment and sub-segment levels. Enterprise reviews had only been possible on an ad hoc basis and often without historical or additional business data to provide context for the current business performance.

The solution

Thomson Reuters were aware of the successful implementation of the Metapraxis-developed Sales Forecasting and Sales Management Dashboard at Refinitiv, which was used as the starting point of the Thomson Reuters solution.

Further analysis by the team was performed on the specifics of the Thomson Reuters sales cycle length, and the data created and retained by each of the sales systems.

Through enterprise workshops with system owners, alignment was achieved on the mappings required to transform sales data from across the various 15 sales systems into one single, cohesive and consistent data set suitable for integrating into the pre-configured application.

Once established, the enterprise sales pipeline could then be restated to reflect structural changes within the organisation. This process then repeats throughout the year as new products and sub-segments are added.

Through our knowledge and experience working with similar customers, we were able to build statistical forecasting algorithms that could be refined for each segment and sub-segment. This provides a statistical validation of the manually created sales forecasts within the business, driven solely by current pipeline levels and historical performance.

The impact

Richer analysis: The implementation of the Metapraxis application has provided Thomson Reuters with a rich source for historical data, providing two years’ worth of pipeline and actuals that are restated to reflect their new business model. This model is used to drive forward a statistically calculated forecast for the rolling three month period as an unbiased comparison to Plan, New Opportunities, and Sales Reporting Forecasts.

Time saved: Once established, the enterprise sales pipeline can then be restated to reflect structural changes within the organisation. This process is repeated throughout the year as new products and sub-segments are added.

Better decision-making: the application assembles data points from both the pipeline, manual sales forecasts, and statistical forecasts. It provides the context of historical performance for the sales, finance and operations teams to review together on a regular basis The focus on contextualising performance provides decisions makers with the insight needed to take decisions on both a macro and micro level to support the business in achieving the best possible performance.

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About Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters is a global brand and one of the world’s largest media and information companies, providing intelligence, technology and human expertise to professionals in many industries worldwide