Evolution Of The Forecasting Function

EVOLUTION OF THE FORECASTING FUNCTION By Larry Lapide (This is an ongoing column in The Journal, which is intended to give a brief view on a potential topic of interest to practitioners of business forecasting. Suggestions on topics that you would like to see covered should be sent via email to llapide@mit.edu). I was pleasantly surprised when Professor Chaman Jain asked me to devote this column to my perspective on the evolution of the forecasting function over the past 25 years to commemorate the Journal of Business Forecasting’s 25th anniversary. I was mostly surprised, however, because I realized that my experience actually started earlier (30 years ago), in 1976 during my first industry job at a consulting firm, A.D. Little (ADL). This firm was unique because Robert G. (Bob) Brown walked the ADL halls before me and left behind a strong legacy that was passed on to me. He was the person in the late 1950s who was largely responsible for bringing exponential smoothing and other smoothing forecasting methods to industry, especially for use in inventory management. My bottom line on the evolution during my tenure is that forecasting functions got much more important in most ...