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.
The one-number forecasting concept has been debated for years. Advocates argue that having different groups within the same organization working to different forecasts is insane. You can't have the supply chain building to X, the sales force selling to Y, and the financial folks counting on revenue of Z. This
There is a well recognized phenomenon that combining forecasts, derived from different methods using different sources of information, can improve forecast accuracy. This approach, sometimes called "ensemble forecasting," is available in SAS Forecast Server. Per Scott Armstrong's review of 57 studies on combining forecasts, "the combined forecast can be better
Back in 2012 I advocated man-dog love and introduced you to my foster dog Mikey. While an endearing little fellow, Mikey did have a bit of a fabric fetish, so his new family has neither curtains nor tablecloths. Mikey's fetish was discovered while still in foster, when he tore the skirt off
