Answers To Your Forecasting Questions

ANSWERS TO YOUR FORECASTING QUESTIONS Q. I’ve just reviewed your benchmarking issue of JBF, Winter 2006-2007. In that article, you state that the average company in the United States (all industries combined) now has 4.2 full-time forecasters. Did you calculate this number by industry/business size? In addition, did you explore the issue of how many SKUs the average forecaster is responsible for forecasting? A. As I stated in the text, this number is of all the industries combined, regardless of the size of the industry/business. But we have numbers of forecasters by industry. I believe that you are interested in the consumer products industry, which is now 6.0 forecasters per company. So far, we have not addressed the issue of how many SKUs the average forecaster handles. But we intend to do so in the future. Q. I am a forecasting manager in a company that manufactures fine business paper. We are planning to “beef up” our forecasting department (which is currently just me). In my opinion, to provide good forecasts for about 600 products covering close to 50 customers, we need not only a forecasting tool, but also additional analysts to study trends and events before ...