Forecasting: Practice and Process for Demand Management (with CD-ROM)

How do forecast managers and planners create forecasts for products and services? FORECASTING: PRACTICE AND PROCESS FOR DEMAND MANAGEMENT covers topics ranging from macroeconomic forecasting procedures to specific product-level forecasting. This is a must-have book for anyone interested in pursuing this field!

In this revision of their 1984 book The Modern Forecaster, Levenbach (president, Delphus Inc., a software-development and sales- consulting firm) and Cleary (a frequent corporate marketing and finance officer) present explanations of the most widely accepted and practiced quantitative methods in business forecasting. After first covering traditional approaches of a number of problems, they treat resistant (safeguarding against unusual values) and robust (safeguarding against departures from classical statistical assumption) alternatives to the same problems. Over the course of the book they include statistical forecasting tools in exploratory data analysis, elements of robust/resistant estimation, regression diagnostics, and state-space models. Included on the CD-ROM is an Excel spreadsheet software add-in to aid students with the exercises and examples in the text. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Hans Levenbach starts his career at AT&T Bell Laboratories as an applied statistician, participating in forecasting project and developing analytical support systems for the Bell Operating Companies. Over the years he has many years of teaching experience as Adjunct Professor in the Business Schools of Columbia University and New York University. In 1996, he was a Visiting Professor at the Stern School of Business at NYU. In his professional life, he served as President, Treasurer and Board member of the International Institute of Forecasters (IIF). In June 2003 he was elected Fellow of the IIF. Hans graduated from Acadia University (Canada) with a degree in Physics and Mathematics, and received an MSc in Electrical Engineering from Queen's University (Canada) and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Mathematical Statistics from the University of Toronto. Hans is involved in all aspects of the company and particularly enjoys working with forecasting practitioners and software developers.

James P. Cleary held a number of leadership positions in marketing and finance at AT&T, Lucent Technologies, Avaya, and New York Telephone Company. Recently, he developed market sizing and quantified business case value propositions that demonstrated the product benefits from the perspectives of the end users, the service providers and the manufacturer. He directed the business management functions of strategic planning, business planning, forecasting and results analysis. He also led a forecast improvement team that improved the accuracy of the customer team demand forecasts. He was the Director-Market Research & Analysis in the Business Communications Services unit. His financial positions included the CFO-Data Communications Services and CFO-Computer Systems. Mr. Cleary developed courses in time series and econometric modeling for AT&T. He also developed a course for managers of the forecasting function.