Demand
What customers will want, when, and how sure we can be.
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Stop 1
Forecasting fundamentals
What a demand forecast is made of, and why the decision it feeds sets its horizon and level of detail.
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Stop 2
Demand patterns & classification
Smooth, erratic, intermittent or lumpy. Classify each item's demand first, because the class decides which methods can work.
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Stop 3
Exponential smoothing & ETS
SES, Holt, damped trend and Holt-Winters, all built on one idea, plus the ETS family that ties them together.
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Stop 4
Intermittent demand: Croston, SBA, TSB
Forecasting spare parts and slow movers that sell in occasional bursts with long gaps in between.
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Stop 5
ML & global forecasting models
Gradient boosting, deep learning and foundation models that learn across thousands of series at once, and when they actually win.
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Stop 6
Forecast accuracy & bias
MAPE, WMAPE, MASE, bias and tracking signal, what each one really measures and when each one misleads.
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Stop 7
Probabilistic forecasting
Forecasting a range of outcomes and its quantiles instead of a single number, so stock can be set for the risk you choose.
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Stop 8
Hierarchical forecasting
Making forecasts for SKUs, regions and the total add up: bottom-up, top-down, middle-out and optimal reconciliation.
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Stop 9
Promotions, cannibalization & halo
Estimating how much extra a promotion sells, the dip that follows, and what it does to related products.
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Stop 10
New products & phase-outs
Forecasting launches with no sales history, and running old products down without dead stock or lost sales.
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Stop 11
Demand sensing & shaping
Reading the latest short-term signals to correct the near-term forecast, and using price and promotion to steer demand toward supply.
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Stop 12
Consensus forecasting & FVA
Letting sales, marketing and planner judgment into the forecast only where it actually makes the forecast better.