Tom reacts to Peter Catt’s article entitled “Assessing the Cost of Forecast Error; A Practical Example.” (Published in Issue 7 of Foresight) NOTE: This is one of 3 commentaries on Catt’s article. Copyright International Institute of Forecasters, 2007

John’s key points are these. • Organizations should consider which service level measure aligns most closely to their corporate objectives. Cost of Forecast Error (CFE) calculations should be based on this measure. • Assessment of service level targets at higher levels of aggregation...

Pharmaceutical companies face the problem of how to project the persistency patterns of patients who are taking their manufactured medications – i.e., how to determine the percentage of patients who will continue to refill a given prescription on a timely basis. The authors have developed a...

Michael reacts to Peter Catt’s article entitled “Assessing the Cost of Forecast Error; A Practical Example.” (Published in Issue 7 of Foresight) NOTE: This is one of 3 commentaries on Catt’s article. Copyright International Institute of Forecasters, 2007

When we rely on the judgment of experts to help produce our forecasts, the key issues are how to get the appropriate information from our consultants and how to get a forecast if we are using multiple experts. Gene Rowe describes the Delphi method, tells what it offers to the forecaster, and...

Scott reacts to Peter Catt’s article entitled “Assessing the Cost of Forecast Error; A Practical Example.” (Published in Issue 7 of Foresight) NOTE: This is one of 3 commentaries on Catt’s article. Copyright International Institute of Forecasters, 2007

In this Hot New Research Column in Foresight, Paul reports on three new approaches to the difficult challenge of supermarket forecasting. James Taylor has investigated a robust approach to this challenge; he calls it exponentially weighted quantile regression (EWQR). Aburto and Weber propose...

Organizational Knowledge can serve as a competitive advantage for companies. John and Terry draw examples from audits of the forecasting process at many companies to demonstrate how firms can use sales forecasting and sales and operations planning to gather and refine information about changing...

Lauge Valentin presents a case for abandoning percentage errors when evaluating forecasts and replacing them by scaled errors. He describes how the shift from percentage errors to scaled errors was motivated by his company’s need for an accuracy statistic that would lend itself to benchmarking...

In their ongoing investigation into corporate forecasting practices, Robert Fildes and Paul Goodwin have uncovered evidence of excessive use of judgmental adjustment to statistical forecasts. In this report, they document the extent of the problem within four large companies, explore the...