Product portfolios will always evolve to meet the demands of customers, but in difficult economic times the decision to add or eliminate products has even more risk. This presentation describes alternative approaches to three particularly troublesome forecasting situations: new products, low volume products, and highly season products.
- For new products (with little or no history), the use of structured analogies can help automate the process while exposing management biases that lead to poor product release decisions.
- For extremely low volume products, simply pruning the item from your offerings can eliminate the forecasting problem and have financial benefits.
- For highly seasonal items (sold only during certain parts of the year), the method of time compression lets you apply traditional forecasting techniques to transformed historical data.
In a struggling economy, organizations cannot afford to waste time and money on ineffective forecasting solutions. This presentation shares three new ways to deal with commonly problematic forecasting areas.
About Mike Gilliland, Product Marketing Manager
Michael Gilliland is Product Marketing Manager for SAS forecasting software, and has worked in consumer products forecasting for over fifteen years in the food, electronics, and apparel industries. He serves on the Advisory Board of the Institute of Business Forecasting, and moderates their annual Consumer Products & Retail Forecasting Forum. He writes a column on "Worst Practices in Business Forecasting" for IBF's Supply Chain Forecasting Digest, and has published in Supply Chain Management Review, Journal of Business Forecasting, Foresight: The International Journal of Applied Forecasting, and APICS Magazine. Gilliland holds Master's degrees in Philosophy and Mathematical Sciences from Johns Hopkins University, and was named a 2007 "Pro to Know" by Supply & Demand Chain Executive magazine.
Join Gilliland at the Demand Planning and Forecasting: Best Practices Conference scheduled for April 29 - May 1 in Las Vegas. He will be the moderator for the CPG/Retail Forecasting Forum. For more information and to register, visit www.ibf.org/0904.cfm.
