Michael Gilliland is a longtime business forecasting practitioner and formerly a Product Marketing Manager for SAS Forecasting. He is on the Board of Directors of the International Institute of Forecasters, and is Associate Editor of their practitioner journal Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting. Mike is author of The Business Forecasting Deal (Wiley, 2010) and former editor of the free e-book Forecasting with SAS: Special Collection (SAS Press, 2020). He is principal editor of Business Forecasting: Practical Problems and Solutions (Wiley, 2015) and Business Forecasting: The Emerging Role of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (Wiley, 2021). In 2017 Mike received the Institute of Business Forecasting's Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2021 his paper "FVA: A Reality Check on Forecasting Practices" was inducted into the Foresight Hall of Fame. Mike initiated The Business Forecasting Deal blog in 2009 to help expose the seamy underbelly of forecasting practice, and to provide practical solutions to its most vexing problems.
On July 24, 10am ET, Stavros Asimakopoulos delivers the next installment of the Foresight/SAS Webinar Series, "Forecasting 'In the Pocket': Mobile Devices Can Improve Collaboration." Based on his article (co-authored with George Boretos and Constantinos Mourlas) in the Winter 2014 issue of Foresight, Stavros will discuss how smartphones, tablet computers
The BFD blog probably won't make you the best forecaster you can be. There are plenty of books and articles and world class forecasting researchers (many of them meeting next week in Rotterdam at the International Symposium on Forecasting), that can teach you the most sophisticated techniques to squeeze every last
In 1965's Subterranean Homesick Blues, Bob Dylan taught us: You don't need a weatherman / To know which way the wind blows In 1972's You Don't Mess Around with Jim, Jim Croce taught us: You don't spit into the wind By combining these two teachings, one can logically conclude that:
Our tradition from Foresight’s birth in 2005 has been to feature a particular topic of interest and value to practicing forecasters. These feature sections have covered a wide range of areas: the politics of forecasting, how and when to judgmentally adjust statistical forecasts, forecasting support systems, why we should
We're entering the busy season for forecasting events, and here is the current calendar: Analytics2014 - Frankfurt The European edition of Analytics2014 kicks off tomorrow in Frankfurt, Germany. Five hundred of the leading thinkers and doers in the analytics profession hook up for two full days of interaction and learning.
As we saw in Steve Morlidge's study of forecast quality in the supply chain (Part 1, Part 2), 52% of the forecasts in his sample were worse than a naive (random walk) forecast. This meant that over half the time, these companies would have been better off doing nothing and
As we saw last time with Steve Morlidge's analysis of the M3 data, forecasts produced by experts under controlled conditions with no difficult-to-forecast series still failed to beat a naive forecast 30% of the time. So how bad could it be for real-life practitioners forecasting real-life industrial data? In two words:
The Spring 2014 issue of Foresight includes Steve Morlidge's latest article on the topic of forecastability and forecasting performance. He reports on sample data obtained from eight business operating in consumer (B2C) and industrial (B2B) markets. Before we look at these new results, let's review his previous arguments: 1. All
Here is editor Len Tashman's preview of the new Spring 2014 issue of Foresight. In particular note the new article by Steve Morlidge of CatchBull, reporting on an analysis of eight B2B and B2C companies, which we'll discuss in a separate post. An organization’s collaboration in forecasting and planning has
Q: How would you set the target for demand planners: all products at 0.7? All at practical limit (0.5)? A: In principle, forecasts are capable of being brought to the practical limit of an RAE of 0.5. Whether it is sensible to attempt to do this for all products irrespective
Q: How important is it to recognize real trend change in noisy data? A: It is very important. In fact the job of any forecast algorithm is to predict the signal – whether it is trending or not – and to ignore the noise. Unfortuantely this is not easy to
Q: Do you think the forecaster should distribute forecast accuracy to stakeholders (e.g. to show how good/bad the forecast is) or do you think this will confuse stakeholders? A: This just depends what is meant by stakeholders. And what is meant by forecast accuracy. If stakeholders means those people who
In a pair of articles published in Foresight, and in his SAS/Foresight webinar "Avoidability of Forecast Error" last November, Steve Morlidge of CatchBull laid out a compelling new approach on the subject of "forecastability." It is generally agreed that the naive model (i.e. random walk or "no change" model) provides
Engaging the sales force in forecasting sounds like a good idea, doesn't it? Compared to everyone else in the organization, don't sales people have the closest contact with our customers? Therefore, shouldn't they know better than anyone else our customers' future behavior? There are at least three problems with assuming
Whether to engage sales people in the forecasting process remains hotly debated on LinkedIn. While I have no objection in principle to sales people being involved in the process, I'm very skeptical of the value of doing so. Unless there is solid evidence that input from the sales force has improved
A recurring question among business forecasters is how to incorporate input from the sales force. We discussed this last year in The BFD post "Role of the sales force in forecasting." But the question came up again this week in the Institute of Business Forecasting discussion group on LinkedIn, where
SAS/Foresight Webinar Series On Thursday February 20, 11am ET, join Martin Joseph, Managing Owner of Rivershill Consultancy for this quarter's installment of the SAS/Foresight Webinar Series. Martin will be presenting "The Forecasting Mantra" -- a template that identifies the elements required to achieve sustained, world-class forecasting and planning excellence. He'll also
Life gifts us very few miracles. So when a miracle happens, we must be prepared to embrace it, and appreciate its worth. In 1947, in New York City, there was the Miracle on 34th Street. In 1980, at the Winter Olympics, there was the miracle on ice. In 1992, at the Academy Awards, there was
I've always thought of TV weather forecasters as just talking heads. Sure they look pretty, waving hands in front of fancy green-screen graphics, reading poetically off the teleprompters, and standing fearlessly in the midst of the worst storm conditions. But could we expect man candy as tart as Al Roker and Willard
Where is global warming when you need it? Throughout much of the southeast, life has been at a standstill since midday yesterday, when 2" of snow and 20oF temperatures brought civilization to its knees. If your life, or at least your forecasting career, is at a similar standstill, make plans to
In this quarter's installment of the SAS/Foresight Webinar Series, Martin Joseph and Alec Finney of Rivershill Consultancy discuss "The Forecasting Mantra." Based on their article in the Winter 2009 issue of Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting, the webinar provides a template that identifies all the elements required to achieve sustained, world-class forecasting
High in the mountains of Colorado, Foresight editor-in-chief Len Tashman previews the new issue: What proficiencies are essential for today’s business forecasters and planners? Sujit Singh offers a detailed and quite formidable list in Critical Skills for the Business Forecaster, our feature article in this 32nd issue of Foresight. While
We ended last time having selected a cluster of surrogate products -- a subset of the original selection of like-items that had the same attributes as the new product. Judgment has been used throughout the process so far, in specification of the relevant attributes, filtering the original candidate pool of
Seems like we've been here before. It is January, so time again to announce the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For in the US. This year SAS is at #2, our fifth straight year in the top 3, over which our average rank has been 1.8. We've covered this topic
The Query step begins by selecting like-items based on the appropriate product attributes, then reviewing historical sales of past new product introductions. Continuing with the DVD example, suppose the new release is an R-rated horror movie. For like-items, we would query our database and pull the history of all prior
In the previous installment we were reminded of the potential abuses of forecasting by analogy. People are naturally reluctant to forecast that their new product idea is going to flop. Therefore, there is an inclination to ignore similar items that failed in the marketplace, or apply less weight to the failures than
The real estate market provides a good example of the use of analogies. To determine a reasonable listing price for a property (such as this dump on the right) that is new on the market, the sales agent will prepare a list of "comps" (comparable homes) that are currently on the market or
How do you build a forecast when you have no historical data? This is a recurring challenge for businesses that update their product offerings, and a recurring question in online forecasting discussion groups (e.g. this one on LinkedIn). The bad news is that you probably can't expect to achieve highly
While fancy new forecasting models will always be of interest to researchers, there is plenty of really interesting and practical new work being led by forecasting practitioners. Last month Steve Morlidge (who spent 30 years at Unilever, now with CatchBull), shared his promising new approach on the “Avoidability of Forecast
Forecasting Support Systems (FSS) – essentially, decision support systems for forecasters – are being given increasing scrutiny in forecasting circles, including our recent half-dozen articles in Foresight. Additionally this year, there has been a special issue of the International Journal of Forecasting focused on the topic. Keith Ord and
