Category: Forecast Accuracy

Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) measures how far forecasts deviate from actuals. Learn the RMSE formula, how to interpret it, and how it compares to MAE and MAPE.

Forecast accuracy is at the top of the list of things that help a business plan better for the future. This blog previews how to improve forecast accuracy.

Each year, visitors read our supply chain blog to take advantage of all that we have shared. This is the round up of our top posts.

Businesses spend a lot of time and money in improving their demand planning. However, the ROI is not always forthcoming. How much is a 1% improvement in forecast accuracy worth to the business?

These “key tools” balance a need for simple with a need to handle the complexity of SCM – following the IBM adage – complexity exists whether you ignore it or not, best not to ignore it.

Our focus in this blog series has been to establish forecast accuracy targets. In very general terms, the goal should be to add value to the business through the forecasting process. We have however focused on the forecast value add and using that to create a minimum acceptable forecast accuracy target in the previous blog. Now we will take that a step further and talk of ways of improving it.

It is important to measure and improve the forecast accuracy at the right level of aggregation. If you measure at too high a level, your accuracy picture will look better than what it needs to be as the data at high (aggregated) levels is more forecastable. By contrast, at too low a level...

A company’s total inventory consists of many types of stock such as strategic, anticipation, safety, cycle, and unplanned. Cycle stock is most connected to the demand forecast; it is expected to be sold as the forecast becomes real demand. Safety stock on the other hand is extra stock to deal with the variability of the demand or supply. As such, it is not always linked to forecasting accuracy.

Learn the best approach to setting forecast accuracy targets and how to set expectations for your management team.

Having access to an accurate forecast is very beneficial for businesses. If used correctly, it can provide better margins, increase market shares, and many other positive results. At a more tactical level, it can help reduce the costs associated with meeting the customer demand and make the supply chain more efficient.

Demand sensing helps us identify the actual customer order trends and helps us improve the near-term forecast. Strategic actions like demand shaping for knowingly increasing or decreasing the demand for the product can be undertaken by sensing demand signals.

Over the past few months, we’ve been running simulation tests on different demand forecasting methods: Winter’s additive & multiplicative, seasonal and robust seasonal. Then, we used MAPE to determine the forecast accuracy for each method. Here’s what we found.