Javelin Forecasting

Javelin™ Forecast Designer has a highly visual interface that clearly outlines every step needed to to achieve a credible patient-based forecast.

Understand the market environment

The first step in creating a solid forecast is to understand the dynamics of the patient population. Forecast Designer makes it easy to quickly map your product’s treatment process. You can then add new segments and vary assumptions by segment for each phase.

Unlike other forecasting platforms that force you to define your segmentation up front, Forecast Designer makes it easy to add segments over time as you need them. It only takes a few clicks to change your treatment process or to change your segmentation.

 

At this point, you can already learn a lot about your product’s potential. In the corner of the screen, Forecast Designer provides an overview of your patient population; just change any of your assumptions and see the effect on your population in real time. This kind of exploration is an effective way to identify important levers you can use to maximize the brand’s potential.

 

See how your product fits in the competitive landscape

The best way to model against your competitors depends on where your product is in its lifecycle. Forecast Designer offers several ways to manage this critical part of your forecast, and—as with everything in Forecast Designer—it’s easy to switch from one method to another as your needs change.

In the earliest stages, it may make sense to use a peak share value and an adoption curve, or you might use just a single estimated share number. You can even add data about similar products so that you can compare your products to analogs.

Since so much depends on the timing of competitive events (such as new product launches, patent expiration, or anticipated regulation changes), Forecast Designer includes a timeline with each input, so you always know that you’re taking the most important market events into account.

As your product gets closer to launch, you can refine this model to use scores and weights to generate estimated product shares based on attribute performance and weighting or even directly integrate conjoint study results.

Once the product has launched, you can stay with any of these methods, or switch to trend-based forecasting.

No matter which method you choose, you can also include advanced options like cannibalization effects associated with generic or branded competitive entry. You can see the effects of your changes as you make them by viewing the market share overview.

Keep track of your assumptions and data sources

Recording all of your assumptions and data sources is key to a credible forecast, but it can be a real chore. Forecast Designer makes it easy by including a notes panel on every screen of the application—and you can tie your note to any specific piece of data in the forecast.

Even better, the software includes a built-in summary report of all of your notes, so it’s easy to create documentation for all of your assumptions in an easy-to-read form.

Explore your forecast in depth

Once you’ve established a baseline forecast, the next step is to test scenarios. By this point, you’ve probably already taken advantage of Forecast Designer’s easy editing to see where the forecast is most sensitive. To give you further guidance, the software includes a Tornado graph that shows you the extent to which your forecasting results depend on different input parameters.

You can also add assumptions about uncertainty to your model. Instead of point estimates, you can change almost any input to a ranged distribution. Then, Forecast Designer will run Monte Carlo simulations on your model to give you confidence intervals for different aspects of your forecast.

Lastly, it’s easy to save multiple scenarios: you can keep one official forecast and as many exploratory scenarios as you like.

Share your results

You’ve already heard about the documentation summary and the Tornado graph, but Forecast Designer also includes more than a dozen built-in report types, from market potential to market share. Each of these reports can be adjusted to your needs and easily exported to Microsoft PowerPoint® or other applications. You can create a management-ready forecast summary, complete with probability effects, fully documented assumptions, and attractive tables and graphs in record time.