Life-Cycle Forecasting for New Products: The HP Approach to Forecasting Printer Demand

Forecasting for products with short life cycles is a well-known challenge. Jerry, Matthew, and Fereydoon describe an approach they developed to forecast printer demand at Hewlett-Packard. The approach has two components: one, which they call the automatic Product Life Cycle (PLC) method, is applied to product forecasts; the other, the Statistical Prediction for Aggregates (SPA) method, is applied to a product family/financial market category. HP believes this approach has improved forecasting performance. Copyright International Institute of Forecasters, 2008