So, what’s next?
I’m starting working in a start up, but I cannot tell you anything about it yet (I’ll have to kill you if I do). Hopefully, I’ll be able to reveal something in the coming months.
But here is a small piece of news on a separate topic I can share. I am starting the spin-off of the Lancaster Centre for Marketing Analytics and Forecasting in the background. We call it “OpenForecast” and it is related to the website I have been developing and maintaining. The website for now is still mainly my blog, but it is now slowly transforming into something bigger. What we want to have with it is a side project doing several things in parallel:
- Open source forecasting software development – my smooth, greybox, muse, fcompdata, and legion packages are the building blocks of this, but we’ll add more. See the github page of the organisation
- Executive training – Kandrika Pritularga and I have delivered several open forecasting courses over the last couple of years, and we think that there is still an apetite for them. So, we plan to continue those and maybe increase the portfolio of courses, introducing more advanced ones, and not necessarily purely on forecasting.
- Consultancy – this is something the CMAF members have done for quite a while. We know what practical issues companies face, and we know how to solve them. So, we want to continue helping business, just outside of the university ecosystem.
What distinguishes us from other consultancies? We have worked and published in the areas of forecasting and inventory management for more than 15 years now. We have taught forecasting, statistics, data mining, machine learning, and other disciplines both to students and to practitioners for many years. We have consulted many companies in supply chain area, and we wrote papers based on some of those projects. We developed software that is used by large companies across the world. So, we are the people who know what they are doing, and you can be 100% sure about that.
One other distinguishing characteristic: we are not influencers, we are academics at core. So, we will not lie to you just to sell you something expensive and shiny. And we are ready to admit mistakes if we make them – something no consultant can allow themselves to do openly.
Who are “we”? Currently, Nikos Kourentzes and I, but this is an early stage of the project, so we will grow and expand :).