Working with certainty: How everyday business forecasters achieve strategic planning success

As a senior executive or manager, one of your priorities is to make informed strategic planning decisions, and to make them fast. But in today’s business landscape, risk and uncertainty is always top-of-mind.  

Volatile markets affecting costs, soaring consumer interest in sustainability demanding green practices, spiraling geo-political tensions threatening supply chains, and disruptive innovations like Generative AI upending operations are just the tip of the iceberg. But it points to the pressing need at the heart of every successful business: accurate, data-driven strategic planning informed by business forecasting. 

With the market for predictive analytics software expected to grow to US$42 Billion by 2028, it’s clear that companies of all shapes and sizes use forecasting as a way to understand and control risk. The key question? With a bevy of new technologies in data science and AI available, are they leveraging forecasting that is being done well? 

You can answer this question in three steps.  

• First, conduct an audit and uncover how much your business has lost through inaccurate forecasting. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, behavioral economist Cass Sunstein, and strategist Olivier Sibony highlight this common weakness in executive decision-making in their 2021 book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement — nearly every company they have worked with was not being honest with themselves. 
• Second, analyze existing forecasting processes and frameworks. Forecasts are fundamentally based on limited information and knowledge and must be constantly adjusted to compensate. The more limited the data, the higher the risk of inaccuracy and the more intervention is needed. The frequency of adjustments is also a critical factor in agile businesses being able to seize opportunities quickly and outperform competitors.  
  
• Finally, update your processes to conform to your organization’s strategic planning and risk frameworks.

One solution, gfknewron Predict, automates manual data analysis and nets companies approximately US$450K per year, according to a Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study. 

Pioneered by GfK, and going one step further than even the widely-watched GfK indices, this forecasting tool offers a practical solution to every business leader’s unspoken desire: the ability to do business with relative certainty. This is why some of the world’s top-performing companies use gfknewron Predict for their strategic planning. It gives them the assurance of planning based on sophisticated business forecasts accessed through customizable, easy-to-use dashboards: bringing the future into the now.