Flashpoints For Changing Your Forecasting Process

FLASHPOINTS FOR CHANGING YOUR FORECASTING PROCESS By David Montgomery With more eyes looking at your forecast, it is likely that you will have a more accurate forecast … the strategy in preparing the most accurate forecast is to decide how much weight to give to each forecast, i.e., how much weight to give to the sales forecast, the customers’ forecast, and the statistical forecast … give the most attention to SKUs, which add the most value to the business. Simultaneously changing your forecasting process and system can be an arduous task, to say the least. Changing your process brings a change in culture, which includes battling the attitude of “This is how we have always done it.” The forecast process change typically requires changing the system IT and functionality alterations—that can strain your business. Both are challenging, but there are certain aspects of each, if addressed early in the change process, can dramatically increase your chances of success. Roughly one year ago, we changed not only the system that we used for forecasting, but also we totally overhauled the process, with a focus on the latter driving the former. There were many things we handled ...