Wow, what a couple of days!! I was involved with the SAS Business Forecasting Conference the last two days and I am impressed with all that I saw and learned! F2010 brought 238 people together from 16 countries to share best practices around business forecasting. You have to take a minute to hear what blogger, Jack Sweeny had to say about the importance of this conference for business forecasters, calling the event "a rare opportunity to talk shop."

The two days were filled with a packed agenda led by co-chairs, Tim Rey of Dow Chemical and Jerry Oglesby of SAS. I had the opportunity to help our own internal teams get ready for the visitors to campus and ensure that we had the right software demos, collateral and customer success stories to share. We had a great time getting ready for this event with our SAS forecasting team including Mike Gilliland, Meredith John, Charlie Chase, Jim Ferris, Ed Katz, Pete Dillman, Jack Hymanson, Vic Richard and we even had Taiyong Lee and Wayne Thompson join us from our data mining practice to share a little about Time Series Data Mining. Our booth covered many of the SAS Solutions for Forecasting as well as consulting and delivery options.

We were also very fortunate to be able to have a book signing with new author, Mike Gilliland. Mike's new book, The Business Forecasting Deal was recently published & we were able to share this with conference attendees! You can download an excerpt from the book, which exposes myths and providing practical forecasting solutions, if you'd like. I hope to see you all again next year!