In a follow-up article to Joe Smith's piece The Alignment of People, Process, and Tools (Foresight, issue 15) Moon agrees fully that tools themselves are not the key to effective forecasting. He argues for clear metrics and an emphasis on the entire culture of the organization, not merely the...

MS Excel offers forecasters very limited capabilities compared to commercial forecasting software. Foresight's "Spotlight on Excel" in the February 2006 issue demonstrated many flaws in the "quick and dirty" manner of some Excel data-analysis functions that produced problematic forecasts. But,...

In this case study of an architectural/engineering firm, Tonya, Ram, and Robert offer a new technique for projecting the scope and costs of professional-service projects. They utilize historical monthly data to estimate relationships between project outputs on one hand and labor inputs and prior...

What is the basis of the adjustments managers make to the statistical forecasts for their product lines? You would expect that intuition plays a role and, of course, there are organizational pressures that come to bear. Research by Philip Hans Franses raises the intriguing possibility that the...

Twenty-five years ago, a team led by Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief applied the United Nations World Input-Output Model to make forecasts of world fuel and mineral resources for the year 2000 and beyond. Ira Sohn, a member of that team, reflects on his experience with this long-term forecasting...

Over the past 15-20 years, improvements in forecasting methods, deepening practical experience, and increasing computing power should have allowed companies to significantly improve their forecasting accuracy. In this paper Robert Rieg examines the changes in forecasting accuracy of a large...

In his Hot New Research Column, Paul Goodwin discusses three recent studies on the effectiveness of traditional tools for new product forecasting: consumer intentions surveys, S curves, and conjoint analysis of the basis of customer preferences. Copyright International Institute of Forecasters, 2008

Paul Goodwin’s latest Hot New Research Column is very appropriate for the summer season. He reports on a recent paper by Haiyan Song and Gang Li, who reviewed research into tourism forecasting published in 121 articles since 2000. Paul also refers to another recently published paper by Sedat...

Andreas extends Carol Gebert’s discussion of the hurdles to implementation of prediction markets (issue 9) with his thoughts on defining the prediction event and the often delicate issue of the types of incentives needed to motivate trader participation in the market. Copyright International...

Sam reviews the three major software offerings on the market today: • Crystal Ball (Version 7.3.1 Professional) from Oracle (formerly Decisioneering), • @RISK and its companion RiskOptimizer (5.0 Industrial - prerelease version) from Palisade • Risk Solver (8.0 - beta) and its companion...