Every analyst has access to historic sales information for products in Planning Analytics and can create various views (and charts) of the data, similar to the ones shown in the previous section, as well as any offline, perhaps intangible knowledge they may come across from the media or other sources. In other words, the forecaster looks at detailed reports (views), showing how much of the product was sold in previous years for the forecast period and makes assumptions as to how differently the product will sell in the same period in the future.

You can see that using Planning Analytics to gain knowledge about data is an advantage, but there is an opportunity here to leverage Watson Analytics to further improve this process.

In the next section, we will create a Watson Analytics project using the same data stored in our Planning Analytics cube to dig deeper into the product data.