Demand Forecasting Best Practices

I grabbed this book in the anticipation of great content to follow author's previous two books (which I highly recommend!). I must sadly report I was hugely disappointed. The book feels like a collection of articles from Medium, which glance over the subjects without going to any practical details. It also feels like various chapters/articles were written at different stages of author's experimentations and experience with modern technology because you will find various contradictions in the text. For instance, at one point author claims that going to granular details is impossible because of required computational resources, when at other point he says that computational resources are currently "virtually limitless". Moreover, some of the material is up to speed with modern science and technology (although he appears to be confused about terms such as AI, ML etc, or at the very least he's not in synch with majority of computer science/data science definitions and creates his own) but at other times he seems to be completely oblivious to modern research in areas such as hierarchical forecast reconciliation and presents material that was popular back in 1970's. Also the treatment of some of the problems, such as lost sales is very simplistic and wouldn't stand the test of some of the more complex supply chains. But perhaps my biggest issue with this book is that I'm not sure who the target audience is supposed to be. Any supply chain professional who had any form of training and experience will find this very basic and redundant (ok most of it). Complete beginners will find it confusing because it doesn't go into necessary depths and honestly, there are books out there that serve much better as a primer to demand planning. There are few precious gems that I would love to rub into the face of majority of senior leaders in finance, sales and marketing, but they are just a few of them and dint warrant purchasing the whole book. And unlike previous books, this one doesn't go into any practical details (with a few extensions, most notably the forecast accuracy chapter, which again, misses a few key points). Overall, the book is not bad, it's just that it's very shallow and it feels like it's trying to advertise author's services as a supply chain consultant rather that teach anything practical. Mr Vandeput, you can do much better than this. You showed us that you can before.

Nicholas has a great impact in my career, his insights on forecasting and demand planning is helpful. His books and wisdom have guided me a lot and expertise continues to inspire me.

Esta me ajudando muito, estou começando na área e cobre muito do que um iniciante precisa. Dando clareza ao que significa previsão de demanda

I can highly recommend this book if you want to review your demand planning process and bring it to the next level. It is full of so many practical advises and 100% to the point. Furthermore Nicolas outlines risks & opportunities and gives great advises how to handle objectives and expectations regarding forecast accuracy.

In my time I have read a few S&OP books. This book definitely has the most practical advice and has been very thought provoking and reflective on what changes we can make to our S&OP process and how it is working. My only criticism would be that even though this book is very long I would have been happy for it to go into even more detail with some of the topics.

highly recommended this book as well as the other two: inventory optimization and data science for supply chain forecasting.