The Foresight journal is respected among forecasting professionals for its concise, objective, readable articles on best forecasting practices, methods, and tools. The Fall 2010 issue will be available soon this month.
SAS product marketing manager Michael Gilliland is the subject of the Forecaster in the Field interview. Mike reveals his major disappointments with the practices of forecasting in organizations and explains how these motivated him to write the book The Business Forecasting Deal. The book itself has also been reviewed by Ulrich Küsters.The feature section presents a hard-hitting look at the Boundaries of Statistical Forecasting. We all know that forecasting is never easy, and the use of quantitative methods (QM) has come up short in so many critical applications. Adam Gordon raises the provocative question of whether the QM approach is inherently doomed.
In this issue's Hot New Research column, Paul Goodwin pays tribute to The Holt-Winters Approach to Exponential Smoothing: 50 Years Old and Going Strong. The methods pioneered by Charles Holt and Peter Winters have become a mainstay for demand forecasting and form the core of most forecasting software systems. Paul discusses new research on Holt-Winters that adapts the methodology to cope more effectively with unusual data, multiple seasonal patterns, and the assessment of uncertainty.
S&OP Editor Bob Stahl covers the last two elements of the five-step S&OP process – the Pre-Meeting and the Executive Meeting – in Executive S&OP: Managing to Achieve Consensus. In these final steps, full crossfunctional collaboration is an essential component, but hardly easy to achieve. One key, Bob argues, is to “force the moose onto the table”; that is, to raise the ugly issues that participants would rather avoid.