Forecasting Volatile Products: The Pursuit of Accuracy
The session explores the challenges of forecasting products that display strong seasonal and cyclical sales patterns. Developing successful forecasts for these products requires a thorough analysis of the market for each product and incorporation of critical input from the marketing and sales organizations. Coupled with an understanding of key drivers and data frequency, this analysis facilitates the selection of the appropriate forecasting technique for each product. While accuracy is a key goal of any forecasting process, the importance of building alliances to improve the understanding and acceptance of forecasting will also be highlighted. Mr. Reynolds will discuss additional analytical tools that can be used to improve your organization’s ability to react quickly to changing market conditions and to strengthen the impact of your forecasting process.

Thomas Reynolds
Manager, Agricultural Economic Research
John Deere

Top Ten Forecast Process Design Considerations
Have you ever wondered why some organizations can bring their forecasting processes to the next level and make major improvements that stick over the long term, while others fail? This session will focus on ten fundamentals required for successful forecast process change—fundamentals that assure repeatable and sustained forecast reliability. Whether your organization has a well-developed S&OP process or is at the beginning of its forecast process journey, you will benefit from this pragmatic, yet thought provoking, perspective on improvement opportunities. Topics covered will include efficient data hierarchy and process design, functional collaboration, benchmarking, tool selection, change management and institutionalizing behavior within the organization.

Joe Smith
Pragmatic Forecasting Associates

Case Study: Forecasting Data Center Demand for Hardware and Power Usage
At Marriott International, Data Center resources comprise a significant portion of the overall IT budget. Accurately forecasting the demand for these resources allows for just-in-time large purchases and—in some cases—the ability to push purchases into the next budget cycle and realize cost savings.

In this session, you will learn how Marriott forecasts hardware demand for its largest IT budget items—servers and storage. Additionally, Ms. Anderson will demonstrate how Marriott has accurately forecasted the storage revenue stream generated by charge backs that is used to justify non-budgeted purchases. Finally—and most important to the greening of the Data Center by reducing its carbon footprint—you will understand how Marriott forecasts its power usage and peak demand.

Kimberly Anderson
Lead Technical Analyst
Marriott International

Demand Synchronization: Realizing the Vision of True Customer Collaboration in CPG
Several market and environmental issues present key challenges for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies—consumers are less loyal and demand innovation while retail segments are blending and retailers have increased buying power. The amount of real-time data available is growing and it is expected that CPG companies will use this data to derive insights quickly to better serve customers and consumers. This session will describe how improved synchronization both across internal functions and with external trading partners can create competitive advantages for CPG firms. The common “pain points” will be reviewed along with recommendations for addressing these issues, with a focus on two critical areas for realizing demand synchronization: 1) collaborative planning and execution and 2) integrated business planning. Finally, a case study of a large CPG company that has implemented a comprehensive end-to-end planning process will be presented, illustrating the tangible benefits of demand synchronization.

Tom Phillips
Senior Manager, Supply Chain Strategy and Operations

Lisa Mazzoni
Manager, Supply Chain Strategy and Operations
Deloitte

How to Engage the Product Leadership Team to Produce Quality Forecasts: The Forecasting Climate Dashboard
After integrating the respective forecasting departments of the former pharmaceutical companies Astra and Zeneca in 2001, AstraZeneca(AZ) has achieved sustainable accurate forecasts by focusing on continuous improvement to its forecasting capability. One key ingredient for this success is the ongoing support from AZ management and their engagement in the forecasting process.

Yet while upper management has fully endorsed the forecasting approach, the commitment by AZ’s product leadership team had been inconsistent. To accommodate the busy schedules of the product leadership team, the forecasting department needed to be creative in developing an innovative vehicle that would add value and help to increase the quality of the product forecasts. In this session, you will learn about the results of those efforts: a product "forecasting climate dashboard" which is used to periodically assess different components that may affect a product's forecast accuracy. Reviewed directly with the product leadership team, the dashboard also helps to identify any potential "climate" risks that impact the forecasts.

Anthony Lee, Ph.D.
Director of Forecasting
AstraZeneca

Panel of Experts: Meeting Forecasting Challenges
This session gives you the opportunity to ask direct questions of a panel of internationally-recognized experts in business forecasting. The questions may address any aspect of forecasting, including the management of the forecasting function, organizational impediments to good forecasting practice, establishment of performance targets and methods and software appropriate for the company’s products. Here is a sampling of questions raised at the last Forecasting Summit:

 How do you effectively set up a forecasting team? Where is the best place for the forecasting function to reside – marketing, finance, operations?
 Our company is trying to work from a single forecast for all groups – marketing, sales, finance and supply-chain. Is this realistic? What are the pitfalls?
 Upper management supplies a sales target. How do you forecast to avoid a “self-fulfilling prophesy”?
 How can a forecaster avoid being blamed for the failure of product sales to meet plan?
 How do you forecast sales in a company whose promotional campaigns do not match the work months?
 How can a company establish a target for forecast accuracy?
 How can a company steer between the pitfalls of (a) overly frequent forecast updates, thus introducing excessive variability and (b) failure to make timely updates, perhaps missing the market?

Moderator:
Dr. Len Tashman
Professor Emeritus
University of Vermont (UVM)

Product Relationship Assessment: A Key to Improving Forecast Accuracy
To forecast demand accurately, it is important to assess complementary and cannibalistic product relationships. For example, in situations where a product is out of stock, cannibalistic product demand is forecasted to increase. Conversely, complementary product demand is forecasted to decrease. In this session, you will learn about a process to incorporate the cross-product impacts on demand of related products to build accurate forecasts. Although the focus on how this approach works is on merchandise product forecasts, the concept can be applied in many other industries. Successful application of this methodology rests on the acceptance of the process across the entire organization.

Anjali Dange, Ph.D.
Statistics Research Manager
Walt Disney World

Descriptions coming soon!  

  Business Forecast Systems in cooperation with the International Institute of Forecasters