Demand and Supply Integration: The Key to World-Class Demand Forecasting

7. World-Class Demand Forecasting

The efforts to understand what constitutes world-class performance in demand forecasting began, for members of the University of Tennessee research team, back in 1984 when none of the researchers involved was even a member of the University of Tennessee faculty! It was in 1984 that my colleague, Tom Mentzer, then a professor at Virginia Tech University, began his series of published papers that documented the state of forecasting practice in industry, which became known as “the Benchmark Studies.” The first two papers were published in the Journal of Forecasting, and they documented two large-scale survey efforts that took place ten years apart, the purpose of which was to take a snapshot of current practice ...