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.
"Forecastability" is a frequent topic of discussion on The BFD, and an essential consideration when evaluating the effectiveness of any forecasting process. A major critique of forecasting benchmarks is that they fail to take forecastability into consideration: An organization with "best in class" forecast accuracy may do so only because
SAS Forecast Server (release 12.3) is now shipping, and includes the new SAS Time Series Studio GUI. Time Series Studio (TSS), was released as "experimental" last August in 12.1, and is now in production. TSS provides an additional interface in Forecast Server, for time series data mining, exploration, and data preparation.
Mercifully, we have reached the final installment of Q&A from the June 20 Foresight-SAS webinar, "Forecast Value Added: A Reality Check on Forecasting Practices." As a reminder, a recording of the webinar is available for on-demand review, and the Foresight article (upon which the webinar was based) is available for free
