Trends is the e-newsletter from Business Forecast Systems. Trends puts more than two decades worth of forecasting knowledge, experience and expertise at your fingertips every other month. Read it for tips & techniques, information & insight, observations & opinions and more.
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Forecasting 101: Going Beyond Automatic Forecasting |
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This installment of Forecasting 101 presents the third of three articles about going beyond automatic forecasting. The first article presented an overview of automatic time series approaches, examining how they work, the pros and cons of using them, and situations where they should not be utilized. The second and third articles explore commonly used customized approaches which allow you to go beyond automatic forecasting. In the last issue we explored event modeling-in this issue we will be looking at top-down models. Read Part 3: Improving Your Forecasting with Top-down Models |
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In November 2006 we began the ongoing Trends "30-Second Survey" series. 30-Second Surveys are anonymous, quick to complete and ask a few basic questions about topics of interest to forecasters. Thus far, we've looked at areas such as how forecasts are generated, the tools used for forecasting, issues involving data, how forecasts are reported and more. Results of each Trends 30-Second Survey are then published in the following issue. One of the most popular surveys conducted thus far is our survey on forecast accuracy. Forecast accuracy continues to be a hot topic. In this issue we reprint the results from the Trends 30-Second Survey on forecast accuracy. |
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The recent trend towards "customer centricity" coupled with the increasing availability of customer-level data has allowed firms to focus on each customer with the goal of maximizing the long-term value derived from that customer. At the Forecasting Summit in Orlando in February, Professor Peter Fader of The Wharton School will explain this basic notion of "customer lifetime value" (CLV) and how to forecast CLV, based on material he developed with Dr. Bruce Hardie of the London Business School. |
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Forecast Pro Tips & Tricks: |
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Forecast projects play an essential role in Forecast Pro Unlimited and Forecast Pro Unlimited Collaborator. Forecast projects allow you to close your forecasting session and return later to pick up where you left off, to archive specific forecast versions or iterations, to automatically maintain and reapply modeling approaches and judgmental overrides as you roll from one forecast cycle to the next, and to easily share your work with any others who are using Forecast Pro Unlimited or Forecast Pro Unlimited Collaborator. This article provides an overview of forecast projects and how to use them effectively. |