Current Forecasting and Marketing Analytics Projects
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The Effective Design and Use of Forecasting Support Systems for Supply Chain Management
The main objectives of this research project are: i) to carry out in-depth research in organisations to find out how forecasters use existing FSSs and to establish where serious deficiencies in current forecasting practice arise and ii) to use prototyping to design and test new features of FSSs suitable for supply chain planning and hence provide recommendations to software designers on how FSSs can be improved.
Collaborating companies include ABInBev, Cow&Gate, McBrides, Heinz and Wilkinsons.
Please see the Special Interest Group on Supply Chain Forecasting for further information.
Score Card for returns
Cash Flow Forecasting
- A major on-line retailer required a forecasting support system for developing short-term cash flow forecasts based on customer purchases using different payment schemes. The key question is what is the likely effect on cash flow of newly introduced schemes.
Forecasting Support System for the Department of Health
- The Department of Health has sponsored a project to develop a forecasting support system to help hospitals and primary care trusts.
Weather Effects on Sales
- An evaluation of the impact of weather on daily retail sales with various software packages and methods, including SARIMAX and artificial neural networks (Client: Tescos). A second project with ABInBev has analysed the effects of weather on both the on-trade and the off-trade.
Promotional modelling: The Design of a Decision Support System to support competitive promotion driven pricing for a food manufacturer
- A manufacturer of a food product where customers are both brand and price sensitive required a model to help in making pricing decisions. The project developed software iwhich was easy-to-use by managers.
The Design of a Decision and Information Support System for a major bank
- This project first established a data base (using Microsoft's Access) relevant to the Bank's decision making in evaluating sector level risk. Using Excel as a programming language an easy-to-use system for analysing the data and linking overall risk to such factors as unemployment, corporate liquidity and house prices was designed and implemented.
Interest rate risk for financial institution
- Realistic simulations of the short and long term movements of various interest rate series in order to assess risks involved with the client's trading strategy. Interest rates from both the USA and the UK were modelled together with the dollar/sterling exchange rate using daily data for several years to meet this objective.
Software Production
- Well-designed forecasting software is crucial to effective industrial applications. The Forecasting Centre is actively involved in the design of software that is innovative and where appropriate incorporates the latest techniques.
Evaluating forecasting systems for stock control and new production systems
- New computer based production and distribution systems rely on effective forecasting. Unfortunately, many if not most widely used packages are poorly designed, sometimes inaccurate and do not take into account new developments in end-user computing. These projects have evaluated existing or proposed forecasting packages compared to the alternatives with particular regard to the company specific data to which they will apply.
Seasonality for Thames Water, Department of Trade
- Seasonality has important implications for business planning and control. These projects have analysed the various patterns of seasonality in the organisations making recommendations as to how they can best be modelled to meet the client's needs.
Short-term forecasting for the British Gas Utilities
- These MSc student projects aimed to model and understand the short term fluctuations in demand (for water and gas) which are primarily caused by weather effects. The models were based on the most advanced econometric techniques and proved effective at improving on current practice.
Forecasting to support telephone activity for a major bank
- Half-hourly forecasts of incoming telephone calls have been provided based on a software package designed in Lancaster.
