Added Seasonality to the Demand Data
One of the things that's really quite limiting about the current demand forecast data from another system at The Shop is that it's not a month-by-month demand projection. They took the year's sales data and then extrapolated for the next month. But in doing so, they have removed any monthly/seasonal trends so that the demand for Boat Tours in Chicago is the same in July as January. Clearly, absurd. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be the will to push a change in and fix the Demand in a reasonable timeframe. So I had to add in some kind of demand adjustment based on the month and some sense of the time to close a deal.
What I came up with was a series of factors - one per month, that could be individually adjusted in a GUI - like an equalizer, and then we'd take each of these and multiply the given demand by this factor and divide by 100 (converting it into a percentage). In this way, we can ramp things up, and shut them down, a month at a time.
If they want to boost something up, they can pretend it's seasonal, and use move everything up to 200%… if they want to suppress something, then move all months to 25% - simple. It's a great plan, and we can "seed" the data with the sales data by service, by month.
What I need to do is to start with the code and then work back as I'm not about to do the GUI first - I'm no artist, and that's what this is going to take to make it look really nice.