There are serious problems with the practice of business forecasting. With the quantity and variety of data growing each year, along with computation power and modeling sophistication, we would expect a progression of improved business forecasting performance.
But this doesn’t seem to be happening. There are few endeavors where so much money has been spent, with so little payback.
A recent study of eight companies in the UK found that more than half of their sales forecasts were less accurate than a naïve “no change” model (forecasting no change from the latest sales period). How could this be? How could companies be spending time and resources to generate forecasts that were often worse than doing nothing and just using the naïve forecast?
The new book, Business Forecasting: Practical Problems and Solutions, addresses this and many other vexing issues faced by today’s business forecaster. The book provides practical advice for business forecasting and is intended for those engaged in, overseeing or relying on the output of an organization’s forecasting process.