In case you weren’t aware of the importance of forecasting for a utility company, it’s really BIG. Not only are you predicting the amount of power required to keep the lights on for fickle residential customers and for complex industrial businesses, you employ hedging strategies to protect against any unforeseen
Are you missing the “A” in your FP&A (financial planning and analysis)? Maybe missing some of the “P” as well? Are you and your department getting a bit tired of the “FR” gig you seem to have landed? I just got back from chairing last week’s IE Group Financial Innovation
While you might not think that businesses outside the trendy, youth-focused fashion and music markets would have much to learn from the practice of “coolhunting”, there are some key product life cycle principles common to both. Coolhunting is market research aimed at discovering, in their infancy, new trends in youth markets, catching
By rights, Steve McGivern, should be a worried man. As the National Forecasting, Roster & Planning Manager at British Gas Services, he has an impossible job: accurately predicting how many service engineers British Gas needs to service and repair millions of domestic boilers during any given week, even while the weather
Do we ever really get pricing right? Sometimes we do, and some of those times are actually on purpose, but it takes a lot of upstream activities to go right in order for pricing to be optimal as well. Too often pricing is that last variable at our disposal when
Question: What is the maximum level of accuracy with which you can predict the toss of a fair coin? Answer: 50% It does not matter that you’ve set a mandatory minimum forecast accuracy level of 90%, or even 60%. There is no incentive, no bonus, no allocation of restricted stock
How does a $55 billion company get a sense of its demand when it operates in virtually every market – from paint to electronics – on a global scale? That’s the question Timothy D. Rey answered during a presentation on how his company, Dow Chemical, used a data mining approach
I worked at the General Dynamics (now Lockheed-Martin) F-16 jet fighter plant in Fort Worth, Texas, during the mid-1980’s, where they subsequently manufactured the F-22 and now the F-35. My tenure there spanned the era of the $400 hammer and $700 toilet seat scandals in the military procurement world. While
There are numerous algorithms used in forecasting, and each of those algorithms is optimized for a certain class of data. How does a business analyst know which forecasting algorithm to use? With the new version of SAS Visual Analytics, you don’t have to know – the product does all the
To read more ongoing tips and insights for small and midsize businesses, follow our SAS4SMB blog series or visit SAS for Small and MidSize Business. We all wish we could predict the future. After all, when a company knows its sales for next week, next month and next year, it
