New book, The Business Forecasting Deal, touts forecast value added analysis

Forecast value added (FVA) analysis helping major corporations improve forecasting performance

CARY, NC  (Jun. 07, 2010)  –  The Business Forecasting Deal by Michael Gilliland describes how to improve forecasting-process efficiency and effectiveness. Using forecast value added (FVA) analysis, Gilliland’s unique perspective helps organizations improve performance by eliminating “worst practices” that sabotage and confound forecasting efforts.

“Organizations spend way too much time and money on forecasting to get inferior results,” says Gilliland, a Product Marketing Manager with SAS, leader in business analytics software and services. “Politics and personal agendas contaminate what should be an objective and scientific process. This is what FVA can expose. This book may not make you the best forecaster you can be, but it will help you avoid being the worst.”

Through FVA analysis - a method that has been employed at major corporations, including Intel, AstraZeneca, Cisco, Yokohama Tire (Canada) and Tempur-Pedic - The Business Forecasting Deal shows how to identify the waste and inefficiencies in the typical forecasting process. By eliminating those surprisingly common practices that make the forecast worse, FVA analysis is helping companies produce better forecasts with less effort and less cost.

"We successfully introduced the forecast value added metric, along with forecast accuracy and bias, at the executive level," said Dr. Anne Robinson, Director of Information and Data Strategy at Cisco. "Throughout The Business Forecasting Deal, Mike Gilliland explains the FVA method along with tips and tricks for creating competent forecasting - and avoiding potential disasters along the way.”

Written for business forecasters and the managers and executives that oversee them, this book provides practical solutions to a wide variety of business forecasting problems. It illustrates a new way to think about business forecasting in the context of uncertainty, randomness and process performance, all within the internal political arena in which real-life forecasting takes place. While there is no magic formula to guarantee perfect forecasts, this book will help organizations find alternative approaches to their business forecasting problems.

Michael Gilliland is a longtime business forecasting practitioner and Product Marketing Manager for SAS^® Forecasting. SAS forecasting software provides large-scale automation to help organizations uncover past trends and forecast the future. The Business Forecasting Deal, part of the Wiley and SAS Business Series published by John Wiley & Sons, is available in bookstores and can be ordered from SAS Press.

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