Latest News and Posts
Keep your forecasting skills sharp by checking out the articles below.
Utilizing Time Fences in Forecast Pro TRAC
Sometimes making changes to near-term forecasts can be an expensive proposition. Last minute changes often significantly increase production and procurement costs, decrease profitability, and negatively impact other aspects of the business. To protect against these effects, many companies establish “time fences” to prohibit changes to the forecast over a defined short-term horizon. This edition of Tips & Tricks details how to set [...]
New Comprehensive Business Forecasting Resource
The newly-published reference book Business Forecasting: Practical Problems and Solutions compiles important and influential literature in the field into a single comprehensive resource for improving your forecasting process. […]
What are Time Series Methods and When Should I Use Them?
Time series methods are forecasting techniques that base the forecast solely on the demand history of the item you are forecasting. They work by capturing patterns in the historical data and extrapolating those patterns into the future. Time series methods are appropriate when you can assume a reasonable amount of continuity between the past and the future. They are best [...]
Working with Alternative Baseline Forecasts
In Forecast Pro TRAC, you have the ability to import externally-generated forecasts into the override grid view. We can choose which of these forecasts we want to use as our “baseline” forecast. This can be done either on an item-by-item basis or for groups of items. If we have specified a baseline forecast that is different than the statistical forecast, [...]
Using Seasonal Simplification to Improve Forecasts
Forecast Pro includes a forecasting approach called seasonal simplification. Seasonal simplification is an extension of exponential smoothing which “simplifies” the modeling of the seasonal pattern by reducing the number of indices used. In many cases the seasonally simplified model can substantially improve forecast accuracy. […]
Using Forecast Pro’s Built-in Outlier Detection and Correction
If you are forecasting a time series that contains an outlier, there is a danger that the outlier could have a significant impact on the forecast. One solution to this problem is to screen the historical data for outliers and replace them with more typical values prior to generating the forecasts. This process is referred to as outlier detection and correction. [...]