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
I have been privileged to have had the opportunity to contribute to the recently published, “Positioned – Strategic Workforce Planning that gets the Right Person in the Right Job”, co-edited by Rob Tripp, Workforce Planning Manager at Ford Motor Company. The list of contributors is a Who’s Who of strategic
During a recent presentation on performance management I had an audience member ask me if perhaps I had minored in cynicism along with my degree in finance. I replied that, with the science, psychology and philosophy I’d taken, I probably had minored in skepticism, but that the cynicism came later,
Wouldn’t it be great if we could predict the future? As a kid, I liked to write sci-fi stories. I wrote stories about what the year 2000 would be like: flying cars, robots, and talking dogs. OK, I won’t admit what year I was actually writing these stories, but back
As leaders and managers of human beings with million year-old brain structures, as part of our managerial toolkit we need to keep ourselves knowledgeable about psychology and the cognitive science of how people make decisions. You have undoubtedly read about how innately bad we are at making certain types of
When you begin your career your most important skills are your hard, technical skills; the finance and accounting, the statistics and economics, the physics and chemistry, the engineering and calculus. But as I tell my business school mentees, as your career progresses, the emphasis changes such that much sooner than
