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Lokad staff posts here tips, news and tutorial either related to Lokad or related to business forecasting in general.

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Tuesday
Jan122010

Ask.Lokad and get answers

DateTuesday, January 12, 2010 at 05:53PM

Although some of you might have already noticed, we did quietly launch ask.lokad.com about one month ago as a replacement of our old forums that were suffering several terminal Web 1.0 design syndrome.

Ask.Lokad is powered by StackExchange, the engine behind StackOverflow the most popular Q/A forum for programming matters.

We have decided to revamp our forums, because we were getting the feeling that most simple questions such Should I consider working days or calendar days for lead time? or Why does ASA get negative when the number of agents get below call intensity? tend to be poorly addressed on the web.

Although, answers are probably buried in textbooks somewhere, our ambitions is to make this sort of knowledge as openly reachable as possible.

Have a question about forecasting, or about the usage of forecasts in your business? Don't hesitate to post on Ask.Lokad, we do our best to get all questions addressed. Then, as Lokad does not have a monopoly over smart people, the community can also challenge our answers with their own.

AuthorJoannes Vermorel | Comment2 Comments |
tagged , , , , , in , ,

Reader Comments (2)

need to come up with a sales forecast of some kind. I have a pretty good guesstimate of what one will look like, but the problem comes from the fact that I cannot back it up with some sort of real-world numbers. I`ve been in contact with several store owners, and industry leaders. No one is willing to or able to share sales forecast information. I was even told point blank by the National Retail Hobby Stores Association that nobody wants to know this information, and that it was "scary". Well, no doubt that it`s scary, but how can you run a retail store without some kind of idea about sales?
February 24, 2010 | Unregistered Commenteracekard
Our experience is that sales data of other business hold very few direct relevance to your business. In order to dig though such data, you have explore tons of weak and unreliable correlations, which truly hard, even for a very talented statistician.

If you want real world numbers, then you have probably no other option but to create them yourself. You can run a little survey in your own store, and optionally start selling the product in very limited quantities (even if it means giving up on the margin at first).
February 24, 2010 | Registered CommenterJoannes Vermorel

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