John is well-known to IIF members, as an author of major research in the area of intermittent demand forecasting, as a column editor for Foresight, and as a former IIF director.

After completing his mathematics degree at Oxford, John has worked in Operational Research at Rolls-Royce (Aero) and Unipart Group, where he became involved in the design and testing of forecasting systems.

Since becoming an academic, over twenty years ago, John has continued to work with organisations on real-life forecasting problems.   

John Boylan’s interests in joining the Centre are to work with colleagues across sectors on: developing a comprehensive framework for intermittent demand forecasting; pursuing further research on temporal and cross-sectional aggregation approaches; and exploring more realistic models of the benefits of information sharing.

John is keen to contribute towards the development of the Centre for Marketing Analytics and Forecasting in working closely with industry, through short courses, workshops, consultancy and research projects.