The SAS Business Knowledge Series now offers an online version of the "Forecast Value Added Analysis" course, taught via live web in two afternoon sessions, May 7-8. The instructor is my colleague Chip Wells, who expanded our original 1/2 day FVA workshop with new material, examples, and exercises based on his experience across the chemical, energy, financial, healthcare, and transportation industries. I attended Chip's initial "test teach," and the course looks great!
Chip holds a PhD in Economics from North Carolina State University, and is co-author of the book Applied Data Mining for Forecasting Using SAS. In addition to teaching forecasting and data mining courses for the SAS Education Division, Chip also serves as an Analytic Consultant for the SAS Advanced Analytics Lab.
From the course description:
Forecast Value Added (FVA) is the change in a forecasting performance metric (such as MAPE or bias) that can be attributed to a particular step or participant in the forecasting process. FVA analysis is used to identify those process activities that are failing to make the forecast better (or may even be making it worse). This course provides step-by-step guidelines for conducting FVA analysis to identify and eliminate the waste, inefficiency, and worst practices in your forecasting process. The result can be better forecasts, with fewer resources and less management time spent on forecasting.
Learn how to
- map your forecasting process
- gather, organize, and store required data
- determine the volatility and forecastability of your demand patterns
- visualize the data
- create the "comet chart" relating forecast accuracy to volatility
- analyze the data using simple methods from statistical process control
- identify worst practices and other non-value adding activities
- report FVA results
- communicate results to management
- eliminate wasted efforts and streamline your forecasting process
- set reasonable forecasting performance objectives and expectations.
Who should attend
Forecasters, demand planners, and business analysts in any industry, as well as managers overseeing the business forecasting function
The live web course will be held Thursday and Friday, May 7-8, from 1:00 - 4:30pm EDT each afternoon. The cost is $825 USD, and attendees earn 1.7 EPTO. (Register by adding the course to your cart at the bottom of the page. See also the Course Outline tab for additional information.)
This course does not require knowledge of SAS software, but you should know very basic statistical concepts like mean and standard deviation, randomness, and variability.
