So you think you can outsmart your statistical forecast? Apparently, lots of people do. In "Judgmental Adjustments to Forecasts in the New Economy" (Foresight, Issue 38 (Summer 2015), 31-36), Manzoor Chowdhury and Sonia Manzoor argue that forecasters are becoming more dependent on judgmental adjustments to a statistical forecast. Sometimes this
Tag: Foresight
Editor Len Tashman's Preview of the Spring issue of Foresight The Special Feature article of this 37th issue of Foresight – From Sales and Operations Planning to Business Integration – comes about through a rare but effective collaboration between an academic and a practitioner. The coauthors are Mark Moon, head
Sports provide us with many familiar clichés about playing defense, such as: Defense wins championships. The best defense is a good offense. Or my favorite: The best defense is the one that ranks first statistically in overall defensive performance, after controlling for the quality of the offenses it has faced. Perhaps not
Combining Statistical Analysis with Subjective Judgment (continued) After summarily dismissing regression analysis and correlation analysis as panaceas for the business forecasting problem, Lorie turns next to "salesmen's forecasts."* He first echoes the assumption that we still hear today: This technique of sales forecasting has much to commend it. It is based
*** We interrupt discussion of James H. Lorie's 1957 article with this important announcement *** Hot off the wire, here is editor Len Tashman's preview of the Winter 2015 issue of Foresight: Foresight kicks off its 10th year with the publication of a new survey of business forecasters: Improving Forecast Quality in
Brilliant, humorous, and obscure. Those words could describe two of my favorite comedians, Emo Philips* and the late Dennis Wolfberg. They could also describe, with the addition of "exceedingly" brilliant, "scathingly" humorous, and "apparently totally" obscure, a 1957 article, "Two Important Problems in Sales Forecasting" by James H. Lorie (The
There are some things every company should know about the nature of its business. Yet many organizations don't know these fundamentals -- either because they are short on resources, or their resources don't have the analytical skills to do the work. The summer research projects offered by the Lancaster Centre for Forecasting,
Business forecasting is a highly politicized process, subject to the biases and personal agendas of all forecasting process participants. This is why many -- perhaps most -- human adjustments to the forecast fail to make it better. And this is why relative metrics, such as FVA, are so helpful in
In his Spring 2014 article in Foresight, Paul Goodwin addressed the important issue of point vs. probabilistic forecasts. A point forecast is a single number (e.g., the forecast for item XYZ in December is 635 units). We are all familiar with point forecasts, as these are what's commonly produced (either
In 2015 Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting will celebrate 10 years of publication. From high in his aerie in the Colorado Rockies, here is Editor-in-Chief Len Tashman's preview of the current issue: In this 35th issue of Foresight, we revisit a topic that always generates lively and entertaining