Considering forecasting as an exercise to assess future financial performance as accurately as possible through a bottom-up approach based on actual facts, it appears necessary for an Organisation to become conscious of its own culture.

Many businesses have yet to discover the full benefits of evolving their planning process to include complete and accurate rolling forecasts. With so many external factors that affect the bottom line for these businesses creating rolling forecasts is a sound way to ensure strategic decisions are made.

As most forecasting methods require data, a forecaster analyzes the availability of data from both external and internal sources. The availability of external data is improving rapidly. With the explosion of Internet websites, potential sources of valuable data are becoming limitless. With unstructured data, the need for data mining tools has become a necessity for exploring potential sources of data for consumer analyses and predictive modelling purposes.

In an uncertain and fast-changing world, line managers need to be made aware of the uncertainties and risk inherent in the financial forecasts provided to them. Uncertainty is difficult to manage but uncertainties can be converted into known risk as forecasting capabilities and data management improve.

Planners and managers in supply chain organizations are accustomed to using the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) as their best (and sometimes only) answer to measuring forecast accuracy. It is so ubiquitous that it is hardly questioned.

About the only thing that everyone seemed to agree on in my old company was that forecasting was really important and that our forecasts were poor. I looked in the corporate controller’s database for a definition of what constitutes a ‘good forecast’. But I got zero hits.