FORESIGHT, Issue 37

FORESIGHT, Issue 37

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Description

Spring 2015

Special Feature: From Sales & Operations Planning to Business Integration

  • From Sales & Operations Planning to Business Integration by Mark Moon and Pete Alle
    In this uniquely collaborative effort, Mark Moon, academic and author, and Pete Alle, a Vice President of Supply Chain, present guideposts for overcoming many obstacles to effective business integration through S&OP or its associated labels. They describe the common failings of organizational implementations and convincingly show that success requires both top-down leadership commitment and bottom-up incentive policies and training programs to move corporate culture away from silo behaviors.

Articles

  1. Thinking Big! Incorporating Macrotrends into Supply Chain Planning and Execution by Thomas Goldsby, Chad Autry, and John Bell
    We know that many businesses have a short-term focus in their planning and operations. In this article, Tom, Chad, and John note that companies often take a reactive posture to crises in their supply chains, failing to consider and manage events that present important risks and opportunities. Drawing from their new book Global Macrotrends and Their Impact on Supply Chain Management, the authors examine four key macrotrends and describe how these may well have profound effects on supply chains beyond the immediate future. The authors encourage businesses to devise “strategies that can seize advantages when competitors are blindsided or simply fall behind.”
  2. The United Nations Probabilistic Population Projections: An Introduction to Demographic Forecasting with Uncertainty by Leontine Alkema, Patrick Gerland, Adrian Raftery, and John Wilmoth
    The United Nations publishes projections of populations around the world and breaks these down by age and sex. Traditionally, they are produced with standard demographic methods based on assumptions about future fertility rates, survival probabilities, and migration counts. Such projections, however, were not accompanied by formal statements of uncertainty expressed in probabilistic terms. In July 2014 the UN for the first time issued official probabilistic population projections for all countries to 2100. These projections quantify uncertainty associated with future fertility and mortality trends worldwide. This review article summarizes the probabilistic population projection methods and presents forecasts for population growth over the rest of this century.
  3. Have Corporate Prediction Markets Had Their Heyday? by Thomas Wolfram
    Despite great acclaim for the potential and use of prediction markets as an efficient tool for aggregating individual judgments, corporate adoption has been limited. To find out why, Thomas Wolfram examined existing research and interviewed several dozen key business executives. He reports that problems with overall acceptance of the corporate prediction market (CPM) often stem from a lack of trust by management as well as a greater business focus on big data and social-media content. However, hope for the CPM persists, if certain obstacles can be finessed.
  4. Measuring the Quality of Intermittent-Demand Forecasts: It’s Worse than We’ve Thought! by Steve Morlidge
    In this eye-opening article, Steve Morlidge shows that when our demand histories are intermittent, we should rethink the use of our most common accuracy metrics for selecting a best-forecast method. The problem is acute because many software applications use these metrics for performance evaluation and method selection; in doing so, they potentially provide us with poor feedback and inferior models, resulting in harmful consequences for inventory management.
  5. Forecaster in the Field: Fotios Petropoulos, New Editor for Forecasting Support Systems
  6. Book Review by Stephan Kolassa
    Demand Forecasting for Inventory Control
    by Nick T. Thomopoulos

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