With this issue, Foresight debuts a new column on supply-chain forecasting. John Boylan, our column editor, will offer his insights on the practical challenges of forecasting and reconciling forecasts across the hierarchical levels of a supply chain. Copyright International Institute of...

The "Keys to the White House" is a forecasting model that has retrospectively predicted the popular-vote winner of every American presidential election from 1860 to 1980, and forecast, well ahead of time, the popular-vote winner of every presidential election from 1984 through 2008. Allan...

Joel Kotkin, a leading expert on urban and regional issues, speculates about the prospective demographic profile of the U.S. over the next four decades, focusing on the likely changes in American living patterns, with an emphasis on geographical trend. Copyright International Institute of...

Many studies have pointed to the possibility of substantial benefits from collaboration among supply-chain partners, including information sharing - one form of which is the sharing of forecast information (FIS). In this article, Mohammad Ali and John Boylan report the substantial and specific...

Demand forecasting is often uncritically based on histories of orders received, shipments/sales, or some combination of the two. As Mike Gilliland explains in this article, the ultimate goal - a measurement of true demand - is elusive and not always amenable to simple formulae based on orders...

The Spring 2010 issue of Foresight featured Adam Gordon's presentation of "A DEFT Approach to Trend-Based Foresight." DEFT is the Drivers, Enablers, Friction, and Turners that underpin a trend and determine its course and longevity. In this article, Roy Pearson offers his perspectives on...

Roy Batchelor, Foresight's Financial Forecasting Editor, explains that conventional business-forecasting models are not set up to tell us about the impacts of extreme events-hence, their worst-case forecasts are liable to be less severe than the worst that plays out in the future. While...

Holt-Winters (HW) is the label we frequently give to a set of procedures that form the core of the exponential-smoothing family of forecasting methods. The basic structures were provided by C.C. Holt in 1957 and his student Peter Winters in 1960. Those of you unfamiliar with exponential...

In this Foresight feature article, Adam Gordon distills the lessons we have been learning about the limitations of quantitative forecasting models. He reminds us that the challenges of prediction are daunting and that forecasters should not plunge ahead with quant models without assessing the...

Bob Stahl continues his series of columns on Executive S&OP with his framework for managing the final two steps of the five-step S&OP process, the Pre-Meeting and the Executive Meeting. Visit his earlier columns in Foresight for case studies of the demand-planning and supply-planning steps....