Planning and Forecasting.

In my opinion, this is the most important chapter of the entire course. While it is quite simple and intuitive it covers 2 and the main responsibilities of a manager, Planning and Forecasting.

Planning:-

There are many different levels of planning, whether it is the broad scope of what it is your enterprise will achieve or the smaller details of how it'll do so. This part of chapter 2 kicks off with defining the vision and purpose behind your organization and the subtle differences between the two.

The discussion then moves on deeper into planning around different parameters such as objectives, technology and the business portfolio matrix you wish your own enterprise to follow.

Finally we branch off in a different direction: Responsibility. It shows who is responsible whether the plan succeeds or fails, whether it is to receive rewards and recognition or be held accountable for the resulting losses.

Forecasting:-

Forecasting is the act of predicting a future event based on the past information, whether it is by following a trend or noticing a relationship with another product / time / season.

Forecasting is used on many many types of information, for example using it to calculate demand on a product, greatly helps in calculating other related information such from the supplies and raw material required to the amount of manpower needed to the amount of time needed to satisfy said demand.

As you can see, forecasting is critical to sound planning, it gives a solid amount of information one can base his plans on, instead of simply going by intuition and playing hit or miss.

The lesson progresses into the 2 types of forecasting available: Quantitative and Qualitative discussing when best to use which. (Please note that even with Qualitative forecasting, Quantitative forecasting is required as a reference.)

Finishing up we delve deeper into Quantitative methods including but not limited to: Moving Average, Weighted Moving Average, Exponential Smoothing and Multiple Regression.

As you can see, this chapter is definitely one of the bigger ones and filled to the brim with content, a welcome change from the first.