The Lancaster Centre for Forecasting (John Boylan, Sven Crone, Robert Fildes and Nikos Kourentzes) and the Cardiff Business School (Fotios Petropoulos and Aris Syntetos) successfully ran the workshop on Supply Chain Forecasting for Operations in June this year. There were 30 participants and selected presentations are available here.

The aim of the workshop was to stimulate forecasting research in the area of supply chain operations for possible publication in a special issue of the International Journal of Forecasting. It remains the workshop organizers’ contention that too little attention is paid in the forecasting literature to this important area and its links to demand planning and collaboration, enterprise systems and the Sales and Operations Planning process. Suitable topics considered for the workshop and special issue include

• Integration of forecasting into the organisation
• Organising an effective S&OP Process
• Forecasting new product demand
• Forecasting promotional effects
• Intermittent demand forecasting 
• Bullwhip effect in the supply chain
• Benefits of information sharing
• Information use and aggregation methods  
• Judgmental adjustments to statistical models
• Forecasting systems to support supply chain forecasting

We write to set out the schedule for the special issue (which is not in any way restricted to those who attended the workshop). If you are interested in submitting but are uncertain as to the relevance of your chosen topic, you are invited to send an (extended) abstract to John Boylan or Robert Fildes for an informal view by end October 2016.

Submission of a full paper should be made through the International Journal of Forecasting website and have the end January 2017 as a deadline.

We hope we can encourage you to submit a paper on a topic we’re sure you will agree is an critically important topic in Forecasting and Ops Management practice, one that that hasn’t really got the attention it deserves since the days of Bob Brown, Charles Holt and exponential smoothing!