Revolutionary and Evolutionary Approaches to Leveraging Predictive Business Analytics

The importance of analytics to a supply chain organization will become the top priority and investment in the next few years. The sheer volume and complexity of today’s data are challenging enough, but top organizations of tomorrow will need to turn these data into useful insights quicker and for better decision making to create a competitive advantage. Companies need a new breed of talent, deployment models, and technologies. We cannot simply cobble together existing pieces. What we need is an evolution—and maybe a revolution—in how to look at and use Predictive Analytics. This article describes strategies to understand the basics of Predictive Analytics, and the way to navigate the potential capabilities of demand planning of tomorrow. 4 copyright © 2015 Journal of Business Forecasting | all Rights Reserved | Winter 2014-2015 Is it possible to re-think the traditional approaches to predicting demand or are we stuck in the past? For the most part, forecasting methods and models have not really changed much in years. Unfortunately, the way some companies look at and use data has not changed either. There are a select few businesses, though, that are not only breaking ...