Back in the spring of 2010, business forecasters were filled with trepidation about whether or not an economic recovery was either reasonable or imminent. At Loud Technologies Inc our planning staff wanted to forecast a conservative level of market recovery but didn’t want to commit too much working capital into material spending. Little did...
I suffer from a recurring dream. In that dream, I am standing in front of 300 Stock Controllers explaining how an external baseline will work alongside causal forecasting. The results of this will generate a Simple Exponential Smoothing forecast which in turn will produce auto sourced algorithms over your Bayesian plan. “Don’t worry though,”...
Sometime during the 20th century sales forecasting went from being a necessary part of someone’s job to being someone’s entire job. Sales forecasting, has made the move from being only 1 step in the inventory/production analyst’s planning to a forecaster’s full time position. This is definitely good news for those of us who wanted to...
Businesses go through change frequently and as we all know, change is difficult because we are human. Change and transformation are necessary for companies to adapt and improve, but in order for change to be effective, many factors need to be addressed simultaneously. Take demand planning and forecasting for example. If you work for...
On the supply-side, Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) most commonly fails when an unconstrained plan meets real-world constraints. In this post, we would like to explore the nature of these constraints and suggest ways to moderate the operations plan in order to come up with a more predictable supply capability. Process and Product Constraints...
“Demand Planning”, “Forecasting”, “Brand Operations”, and “Planning” These are not only terms that you will find on my resume, but also the answer I’ve given in social settings when asked what I do for a living. I’ve yet to give an answer without receiving the inevitable follow-up query: What exactly is a Demand Planner?...