Excellent participation in the Forecasting Tutorial

The forecasting workshop on Oct 22 and 23 held at Whippany, NJ was well attended by companies from different industries from Consumer goods, to medical devices to Technology companies. We had participants from

• SMSC
• J&J
• Tools Group
• Bush Brothers
• Merck
• Crabtree and Evelyn
• Avon Products
• Niles Audio

Thanks to the great audience, the workshop was very interactive with people talking about their real world planning experiences and comparing notes on how they dealt with specific situations.  A number of questions were addressed during this interactive forum.  I truly enjoyed the participation and nothing better than conducting a workshop with an engaging audience.  Thank you.

The major focus on the first day was forecasting in the current economy.  There was a lot of discussion on the V-shaped recovery and how to forecast for it.  Although exponential smoothing is an adaptive technique that normally catches up with a lag, it is difficult when the demand suddenly drops and then sharply recovers a few months later.  We all discussed the importance of scenario planning and other techniques that are important like leading indicators.

The guest speakers Mark Temkin and Jay Nearnberg also provided valuable insights to the group.  There was discussion on inventory optimization, S&OP and demand metrics.  There were number of questions on modeling and metrics, particularly the usage of MAPE and the methodology to compute the MAPE.  The weighted Mean Absolute Percent Error seemed to be the most common performance metric used by most organizations, although some had used a variation of it.

Please feel free to post any follow-up questions on this workshop either here or in our Linked-In Group for DemandPlanning Net Training.

Mark Chockalingam

Woburn, MA

November 3, 2009.