Hey there, did you hear the tea? 🍵 In the United Kingdom, King Charles III is about to be crowned on May 6, 2023, Saturday! The weekend of royal festivities will be followed by an additional bank holiday declared for May 8, 2023, Monday to honour the Coronation 👑
So what does this long weekend mean for you as a Forecaster on injixo?
We know you’re a pro and have already made your forecasts for May. That’s great! But hold up, have you marked the calendar accurately?
- ☝️ As the additional bank holiday on May 8, 2023, is a one-time occurrence, you may have noticed that injixo has not indicated it in the standard British holiday calendar under “Public Holidays” (you know, the usual yellow highlighted bars in the injixo calendar or on the side of your navigation bar as shown below)
Here, you can see that May 9 is marked as a Public Holiday by default for Liberation Day, while May 8 shows no indication of being a Public Holiday.
- ☝️ Your forecast is only as good as your historical data. Since the last Coronation was over 70 years ago for Queen Elizabeth, injixo will not be able to find any precedents in the historical data to make a relatable forecast for the celebrations.
- ☝️ The Coronation and additional bank holiday will therefore be calculated by injixo as regular days with regular volumes. So, it is important to check if you’ve made your own necessary indications in your forecasts.
Fret not. We’ve got you covered with 3 simple forecasting steps to make sure your team is fully prepared for the upcoming long weekend 🎉
- 🎈 Events: If you expect that the bank holiday will behave similarly to certain events in the past, you can use our Events feature to make life easier! Just assign an Event to at least one representative day in the historical data, and then assign the same Event to May 8, 2023. This way, injixo will know it should expect a similar behaviour and recalculate that volume for those days. Pretty convenient, right?
Assigning an Event to May 8. This feature is only available for Advanced and Enterprise customers.
E.g. Once you have assigned an Event to at least one representative day in the historical data and May 8, injixo will take into account the usual window of 2 days. This means that the effect on May 6, 7, 9, 10 would also follow the effects as observed around the representative day(s) in the historical data.
- ✏️ Manual adjustments: If you have clearer expectations of your expected volumes, manual adjustments would be the way to go. You can simply indicate them on the selected dates of celebrations. These manual adjustments can be made after setting an Event as well.
- ☀️ Don’t forget intraday: The Event feature will influence the daily volume, but keep in mind that your intraday distribution is being scaled proportionally. Depending on your industry and activities, the best way to handle this would be to set up the Event as described earlier and then manually adjust the intraday level based on your strategy. This will give you an automatic view of your resulting staff requirements. Easy-peasy 👏
We hope that these tips can help you better prepare for the upcoming King's Coronation weekend and take control of your forecasts. Don’t forget to also have fun and enjoy the festivities with your loved ones!
💡Additional tip: There are also other royal events with one-time bank holidays, such as the wedding of Prince William and Kate on April 29, 2011 or the late Queen’s platinum jubilee on June 2 - 3, 2022. If you expect the Coronation to follow a similar pattern, you can mark those dates in your historical data as an Event, and mark the Coronation bank holiday using the same Event type 👑