Benchmarking Forecasting Software And Systems

BENCHMARKING FORECASTING SOFTWARE AND SYSTEMS By Chaman L. Jain, St. John’s University W W ith increasing awareness about the importance of forecasting, more and more companies are looking into software and systems to improve as well as automate their forecasting process. Which forecasting software or forecasting system other companies are using can help in making the right choice. Before going further, however, it is important to know the difference between a forecasting software package and a forecasting system. Forecasting software is a standalone package which is used to generate forecasts using either a model selected by the forecaster or a model selected by the expert system built in the software. The forecasting system does much more than generating forecasts. Most of the forecasting software packages available in the market have an expert system. A package with such a system has an automatic feature that tests a number of forecasting models with the historical data and then prepares a forecast for the next period with a model that, on average, yields the best results. The criteria used for selecting the best model depend on the number of models included in the program to ...