Most executives will tell you that when shaping business plans and strategy, forecasts can serve as a great counterweight to gut feelings and biases. Most will also admit, however, that their forecasts are still notoriously inaccurate.There are signs, however, that some finance teams’ early experiments with automation, machine learning, and advanced analytics are changing the game—particularly for demand planning and sales-and-revenue forecasts. A chemical distributor, for instance, increased its sales by 6 percent because of its ability to conduct more accurate and frequent forecasts that informed its allocation of resources. A retailer and a global engineering-consulting firm both reported similar benefits from advanced analytics, as measured by user responses to new products and by changes in profit on income, respectively.The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the usual forecasting and planning approaches. Demand patterns for different products and services—consumer goods,...
learn more
