Life Cycle Forecasting

Life CyCLe foreCasting 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 I n the span of over 10 years of writing this column I’ve only gotten a few suggestions from readers on topics that they would like to see covered. So about a year and a half ago I was surprised and delighted to get an email note from my colleague, Roger Miller, who was (and may still be) in John Deere’s Parts Division. I had met him during a consulting engagement I did with Deere during my tenure at Accenture. At that time, when I asked people at the company whom to see about estimating the impact of potential service part distribution network changes on Deere’s service parts inventories, they all emphatically said to see Roger. He had been overseeing the company’s extensive parts inventory management system that was originally installed a long time ago with the help of none other than forecasting luminary R.G. Brown. So Roger knows inventory management and forecasting! ...