After sporting events or major elections like the recent U.S. mid-term Senate elections, I tend to look back at how various predictions performed prior to these events, to find out who got it right. My interest in this was spawned after reading Nate Silver’s book The Signal and the Noise,
There are two ways you can react to a “Hey – that was my idea” situation. The first would be to throw a pity party and lament about how unfair life is – if only the car hadn’t broken down and I didn’t have grass to mow and laundry to
Recently, I was reading an online article about predictive modeling and "big data." Its premise was to determine whether the use of big data actually led to more accurate and meaningful predictive models and forecasts. After citing numerous external examples and internal tests that the authors had compiled, it stated
Because you are already halfway there and you should want the entire process to be data-driven, not just the historical reporting and analysis. You are making decisions and using data to support those decisions, but you are leaving value on the table if the analytics don't carry through to forecasting. In the
I recently took some time to appreciate and celebrate the SAS Professional Services division’s 25th anniversary. I find it impressive that SAS professional services has been collaborating with customers across many different industries for 25 years to solve business problems, increase profitability and improve customer service levels. With so much industry
How much of your business performance (profit) is driven by external factors versus internal? A figure of 85% compared to 15% was mentioned at last month’s Manufacturing Analytics Summit, and although I could not find the study mentioned to confirm, it feels about right to me. Certainly more than half,
For supply chain managers and analysts Getting Demand in Shape can mean collecting the most pertinent data to support specific business processes and activities. Identifying new or previously unused data sources can be especially important. My most recent article titled “Getting Demand in Shape” in the May / June issue of APICS magazine
In the game of energy forecasting, you’re never 100 percent right. And for developing countries, forecasters face rapidly expanding economies and high political expectations. Such is the case in India. With its relatively young population (median age of 26), India is expected to take over China as the world’s most
From Gartner to IDC to the trade press, the watchwords in the supply chain for rest of this decade appear to be “resiliency” and “responsiveness”. It’s not going to be about promotion-based pull-through, and it’s most definitely not going to be about channel incentive-based push-through. What it’s going to be
If the latest raft of retail trading updates are anything to go on, it’s pretty clear who the winners were this Christmas: the consumers. A period of heavy discounting – aimed at bolstering weak sales and protecting elusive customer loyalty – was good news for cash-conscious customers, but left many
