Demand and Supply Integration

Chapter 9 World-Class Demand Forecasting

For members of the University of Tennessee research team, the efforts to understand what constitutes world-class performance in demand forecasting began back in 1984, when none of the researchers involved was even a UT faculty member! 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. These studies 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 these papers was to take a snapshot of current practice in forecasting. ...