Forecast5
Analytics Actionable Analytical Tools to Synchronize Financial Resources and Strategic Pl

Combining powerful financial applications inside a next generation collaboration platform provides local governments the potential to identify efficiencies and capitalize on opportunities. Forecast5 Analytics, based in Naperville, Illinois, is transforming the way local governments use data to synchronize financial resources and strategic plans with SaaS solutions.

Created on the basis of providing long range financial planning, resource management, budget optimization, and comparative analytics, Forecast5 Analytics offers a suite of tools that local governments can use across a range of administrative tasks and strategic planning functions. The tools, individually or collectively, can be used for the creation of smarter multi-year budgets and the surveillance of long term financial plans.

While there are many ‘self-service’ analytic solutions available in the market, Forecast5 Analytics’ focus lies in gathering, organizing, and engineering public sector data to build analysis models and develop visual output to accelerate discovery and communication. Mike English, CEO of Forecast5 Analytics says, “We believe that we are leading a transformational change in the public sector with innovative analytic and financial planning concepts.”

Forecast5 offers four core analytic tools. Their Business Intelligence (BI) tool, 5Sight facilitates data discovery and decision support through comparative analytics. Local governments use 5Sight to benchmark key financial metrics such as revenues, expenses, budget performance, staffing allocation and expense modeling. With newfound insights from the business intelligence platform, a 5-year financial plan can be developed with 5Cast that features the ability to

run complex, multi-variate scenario analyses. This dynamic analysis tool gives the public sector the power of a database engine to compare the forecasted scenarios, eliminating the need to maintain multiple spreadsheet files. Customers can also leverage the geo-spatial analytics tool 5Maps to visualize key demographic issues related to their own data plotted on a Google Maps interface. The company’s collaborative analytics tool 5Share allows local governments to communicate and gain key insights by sharing data analytics and best practices.

Forecast5 sees strong traction in the public sector with vertical demand in public education and municipal government, as these entities are focused on managing service level expectations against budgetary constraints. By understanding the financial planning and budgetary process of customers, Forecast5 builds solutions that can generate significant return-on-investment and accelerate processes which can otherwise be very time consuming.

English states, “We have a growing number of public education clients that are beginning to leverage the concept of collaborative data analytics.” Nearly 300 school districts in Illinois cooperated to share health insurance information for the purpose of identifying cost savings opportunities and to help avoid potential tax penalties prescribed by the Affordable Care Act. By collecting the data and building an interactive workbook of analytics, Forecast5 generated potential cost savings ideas for many of the participants. Using data visualization techniques, the firm was able to quantify the competitiveness of each school’s health insurance program and ideas for managing future costs and avoiding unnecessary taxes.

For the years ahead, Forecast5 is enthusiastic about responding to many growth opportunities in the public sector. The company also plans to deploy 5Maps in the private sector as a geo-spatial analysis tool for risk management, sales management, and geographic targeted marketing campaigns.