One of the latest products that SAP has incorporated in its Business Intelligence Suite is SAP Predictive Analysis. Essentially, this product shares its main interface with SAP Lumira (formerly SAP Visual Intelligence) but the added value comes from the Predict workspace where you can find a series of algorithms to build predictive models. With these models you can display projected data behavior and trends in your visualizations, discover hidden insights and relationships in your data, among lots of other possibilities. Obviously, this proves to be very useful to make decisions based on the possible outcome of future events, or build intelligent strategies based on insights that otherwise are not clear to see. 

It doesn’t matter what industry a company belongs to, almost every finance department plans a budget for a fiscal year, records the actual values, and as the year progresses builds a forecast to see how the rest of the months will look like. In this article this is exactly what I will show, a very simple model to do a quick forecast based on revenue obtained in the last 5 years. The idea is that you understand the steps involved so you can build a model like this with any data series you like. At any moment you can click on the images to enlarge them.