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.
Announcing New Book: Business Forecasting Just in time for the new year, Business Forecasting: Practical Problems and Solutions compiles the field's most important and thought provoking new literature into a single comprehensive reference for the business forecaster. So says the marketing literature. The real story? The book does pretty much
In conjunction with the International Institute of Forecasters and the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University, the 2016 Foresight Practitioner conference will be held in Raleigh, NC (October 5-6, 2016) with the theme of: Worst Practices in Forecasting: Today's Mistakes to Tomorrow's Breakthroughs This is the first
"Why forecasting is important" gets searched over 100 times monthly on Google. Search results include plenty of rah-rah articles touting the obvious benefits of an "accurate forecast," but are of little help in the real life business world where high levels of forecast accuracy are usually not achieved. This is
Journal of Business Forecasting columnist Larry Lapide is a longtime favorite of mine. As an industry analyst at AMR, and more recently as an MIT Research Affiliate, Larry's quarterly column is a perpetual source of guidance for the practicing business forecaster. No wonder he received IBF's 2012 Lifetime Achievement in
WRAL Chief Meteorologist (and Friend Of the Business Forecasting Deal) Greg Fishel garnered national attention recently with a thoughtful (yet to some, provocative) blog post on climate change. In the post, Fishel chronicled his evolving thought on the subject. He argued for an end to the political partisanship that stifles
Last week I had the pleasure of attending (with six of my SAS colleagues) the IBF's Best Practices Forecasting Conference in Orlando. Some of the highlights: Charlie Chase and I were interviewed by Russell Goodman of SupplyChainBrain.com. The videos will be posted on SCB's website later this year. Meantime, enjoy
So you think you know how to forecast? Now is your chance to prove it, by participating in a probabilistic load forecasting competition run by my friend (and former SAS colleague), Dr. Tao Hong. Currently a professor at UNC Charlotte and director of the Big Data Energy Analytics Laboratory (BigDEAL),
Editor Len Tashman's Preview of the Fall 2015 issue of Foresight This 39th issue of Foresight features a special section on forecasting support systems (FSS) developed by our FSS Editor Fotios Petropoulos. His article Forecasting Support Systems: Ways Forward highlights three main areas for improvement: better utilization of open-source software
You may not be in London on October 7 to take advantage of the Lancaster Centre for Forecasting's free workshop on promotional forecasting. However, there are still plenty of forecasting educational opportunities coming up this fall: SAS Business Knowledge Series Best Practices in Demand-Driven Forecasting (Chicago, September 24-25) My colleague
Our friends at the Lancaster Centre for Forecasting have announced their next free practitioner workshop. It will be held Wednesday October 7,1:00-5:15pm, at BMA House, Tavistock Square, London WC1H. This session's top is: Promotional Modelling and Forecasting Understanding and forecasting the effects of a promotion for both retailers and manufacturers
