Weekly Inventory Forecast Database

A manufacturer was running its weekly demand forecast out of an Excel workbook — a calculator tab pulling lead times, monthly cabinet-order volume, and per-product mix from a separate sync export, all recalculated by hand every time new numbers came in. Updating it meant touching hundreds of rows across multiple tabs, and the whole process depended on one person who understood exactly how the formulas connected.

We rebuilt it as an MS Access database centered on the actual weekly workflow. A single main menu replaces the tab-hunting: Search Data for looking up and filtering existing records, Import Data for bringing in the latest export, and Summary for the forecast calculation itself. The import screen takes the raw weekly file and loads it straight into the database — no manual copy-paste, no retyping. The forecast calculator was rebuilt to reproduce the original Excel math exactly (lead time days, cumulative days per month, product-mix adjustments, and the resulting cabinet cost of goods figures), but running against imported data instead of formulas spread across a dozen linked cells.

The result: a weekly process that used to eat most of a day now runs in minutes, and it no longer depends on one specific person being available to run it correctly.