Forecasting for Technologists and Engineers

This book is written for all technologists and engineers. To those unfamiliar with forecasting it may appear a somewhat esoteric activity with little relevance to the everyday technical concerns of the reader. This is not so. The aim of this book is to show how forecasting can improve the quality of technical decision making. Furthermore, this can be accomplished without the use of highly sophisticated techniques which can only be applied by specialists. The approaches described in this book can be easily understood and used by all its readers. The techniques of forecasting for technical decisions have been developed over several decades. Unfortunately they are not widely used in industry in the West where they were developed although they are much more widely used in Japan. One of the reasons for this may be that many of the methods appear highly complex and do not appear in the text books read by most technologists. The word "forecasting" is emotive to many people who reject the concept on the grounds that it will never be possible to forecast an uncertain future. Whilst this contains an element of truth it ignores the valuable contribution that a systematic analysis of the future can make to a wide range of decisions. The aim of this book is to describe the most useful methods in terms that all technologists can apply. It is not claimed that they will lead to the making of the "right" decisions. However, the experience of the author in applying them in a range of industries shows clearly that they can assist in making better decisions.