Best practice tips for visualizing your pharma forecast
Here we offer insight into the best practises for visualising your forecast, from thinking about your audience to interacting with data.
- Bring your forecast to life
Move away from static PowerPoint presentation slides and create dynamic, engaging forecasts that uncover insights before the eyes of your audience. Expand charts, view supporting tables, change data and explore scenarios with the audience in the room.
The analytics should be aligned to company brand guidelines for greatest impact.
- Think about your audience
Your senior leadership team, marketing and analytical colleagues will have different requirements. Build bespoke dashboards. Uncover high level or very detailed insights with one click of a button.
Consider the time, objectives and the level of detail required. The senior leadership team will be interested in the agreed KPIs being shown in a visually engaging and easy to understand manner, your analytical colleagues are going to be interested in intuitively exploring the contribution to the forecast of different countries/brands/patients types/events and your marketing colleagues are going to be interested in easily identifying the key drivers to the forecast.
- Explore and interact with the data
Utilize analytical tools, like Power BI. ‘Drill down’ and explore drivers of volume, share, revenue and key events that drive the market/brand changes.
The ability to easily compare against previous forecasts helps to place the current forecast in context. You and your colleagues can explore the contribution individual regions/countries, brands, indications, and patient types are making to the forecast.
Do all of this in real-time, quickly and easily.
- Keep the dashboard clean
Focus first on standard pharma forecasting metrics; patient/volume numbers and shares, volume, revenue and more. Think about how you and your colleagues want to see the data (monthly, quarterly, or annually) and about introducing visuals that are animated to show how metrics change over time. Keep the dashboard clean yet intuitive to promote interaction. Keep the menu/filter options clear and simple and allow users to hide/unhide extra filters where required.
- Set Up is Key
Use a team of people who understand the dynamics of pharmaceutical forecasting and have direct experience in the challenges you would like to address. Starting with a robust forecast based on best practise principles you can then build visualisation and analytics that are targeted at the specific needs of forecasting.
