Consumption-Based Forecasting and Planning

Foreword

I have the honor of writing the foreword to Charles Chase's new book Consumption-Based Forecasting and Planning: Predicting Shifting Demand Patterns in the New Digital Economy. I have known Mr. Chase (“Charlie”) for roughly 35 years. Charlie and I have common interests in business forecasting and market analytics. In addition, Charlie and I are close friends, and he and his wife Cheryl are adopted members of my immediate family.

The purpose of a foreword is to confer credibility to the author(s) and to provide context and background of the book in question. Let's start with credibility. Charles Chase is unquestionably a leader in forecasting/modeling and advanced marketing analytics. Currently employed at SAS Institute, Inc., he is the author of Next Generation Demand Management: People, Process, Analytics, and Technology; Demand-Driven Forecasting: A Structured Approach to Forecasting; and coauthor of Bricks Matter: The Role of Supply Chains in Building Market-Driven Differentiation. Each of these books is required reading in my Business Forecasting PhD-level class at Texas A&M University. Moreover, Charlie has served as president of the International Association of Business Forecasting and currently writes a quarterly column in the Journal of Business Forecasting entitled “Innovations in Business Forecasting.”

Concerning the context of his new pithy tome, the book is divided into seven chapters: (1) The Digital Economy and Unexpected Disruptions; (2) A Wake-up Call ...