10. BUSINESS ELEMENT FORECASTING › 10.6 Case Study › 10.6.5 Automating the Collection of Business Elements

10.6.5 Automating the Collection of Business Elements

The business element data was already tabulated at the
beginning of this case study, so we chose a batch update to
create the business element file.  This type of update is
appropriate when the business element data is readily
available and the study is of short duration.

Once you establish a business element model, you will want to
set up procedures for continuing to use the model to track
forecasts and predict future capacity requirements.  To do
so, you must collect business element data from other
departments and add it to the capacity planning database on
a weekly or monthly basis.

For installations that have the SAS/FSP Product, we have
provided a technique to help you collect this data in a
regular manner.  The technique creates a business element
file within the capacity planning database file, which
contains only the dates for which planning will be done.  All
values of the business elements are set to a missing value.
This provides a formatted file which you can access using the
SAS/FSP interface provided by the Business Element File Data
Entry screen.  This interface is discussed in Section
10.6.2.4.

The same screens shown in Section 10.6.2 are used for
defining this file.  When the Business Element File Data
Entry screen was displayed, we chose to initialize the
business element file instead of selecting batch data entry.
This primed the file with null entries in preparation for
online entry.

After the file was primed, we once more chose the execute
option for the file, but selected the option for online data
entry, which updated the file using SAS/FSP.