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?...
I believe that there are two ways your organization can improve the performance of statistical forecasting: 1) Wait for your business to become more forecastable 2) Develop a process to drive continuous improvement in your statistical forecasting approach At PepsiCo Chicago, we have made great progress to improve the performance of our statistical forecasts by...
We all know that you should measure processes. There is a lot of literature written on this subject, and most companies now have some sort of Lean or Six Sigma program and quality management system that requires processes to be measured for evaluation and improvement purposes. Control is another big aspect of metrics. One...
Our ability to forecast was met with increasing skepticism in 2010 – and this is a good thing. A decade ago, the thrill of technological innovation provided hope that more data, bigger computers, and fancier models would one day solve all our forecasting problems. Yet we now have more data, bigger computers, and fancier...
Last night while I was at the joint APICS/IBF/CSCMP Holiday Networking Collaborative in Boston, MA these three words came to mind, “Strength in numbers.” But before I can explain these three simple words, I should first explain all the abbreviations, right? APICS is the Association for Operations Management, IBF is the Institute of Business...
Go to any supply chain conference, and you will hear it. Yes, the term collaboration is bandied about. It is over-used and often over-hyped in discussions largely without meaning. So, what does it mean? And, what happened to the supply chain collaboration initiatives of the 1990s? Let’s start with the definition. The greatest success...