Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Management
Market and Technology
Forecasting
Factors to be forecast
Marketing:
Demand (future sales): price and volume
Competitor actions/reactions: product/service
improvements, price changes
Operations:
New processes: output, efficiency, labor
requirements, material efficiency
Existing processes: output, efficiency, labor
requirements, material efficiency
Long term
(strategic)
Medium term
Short term
Approaches to
Forecasting
1. Consultation (qualitative/judgmental)
Customers (market research)
Experts (internal personnel/external)
Approaches to Forecasting
According to Chambers, et. al
Qualitative techniques
Time-series analysis
Causal models
Qualitative Techniques
Also termed as judgemental forecasting
Basically consist of seeking opinion and
Consultation: asking
experts
Known as judgement methods
These rely on the experience and knowledge
Delphi Method
A process for gaining consensus from a group
of experts while maintaining their anonimity
It consists of using an initial questionnaire to
gather views, followed by iterative cycles of
preparing a report and seeking more views on
that report.
It is particularly useful when employing
external experts to predict environmental
changes.
Questionnaire
Experts
(unbiased/independent)
Use for
(examples):
Economic
changes
Legal
changes
Analysis
Feedback
Technological
changes,
product and
process
Fashion
changes
Consensus
(report)
cycle)
Smoothing out
randomness
The simplest time-series method is the naive
Incorporating trend
In dealing with the trend, we give a baseline
Simulation methods
Describes the act of creating a complex model
Expert systems
A computer program which contains human
Neural networks
Designed to offer the end-user the capability
Data Mining
Analyzing large databases.
Businesses hope it will allow them to boost
Conjoint analysis
Concerned with the joint effects of two or
Rule-based forecasting
Draws upon features of both expert systems
Judgmental
bootstrapping
Is an extension of expert system methodology
Application Exercise
Case: Concept Generation in the Toy Industry
The toy industry has seen its ups and downs in recent
Question: