OpenForecast turns uncertain demand into confident decisions. We are a specialist demand forecasting and inventory consultancy and training provider, built on more than a decade of forecasting research, teaching, and open-source development. What began as a website sharing forecasting knowledge has grown into a company — but the principle is unchanged: everything we know is published in the open, and everything we sell is the skill of applying it.
What OpenForecast is
Three things, tightly connected. A consultancy that builds forecasting and inventory models around how businesses actually operate — with particular strength in the hard cases, like the intermittent demand of spare parts or in retail. A training provider that teaches practitioners how to correctly forecast and manage inventory in their ERP systems or in Excel, R, or Python. And the home of a family of open-source forecasting packages, such as smooth, greybox, and other, which are grounded in peer-reviewed research and used by analysts worldwide. The packages are the engine; the consulting and training are the application; this site is where all of it lives in the open.
Who we are
Ivan Svetunkov
Ivan is the founder of OpenForecast and the creator of the smooth and greybox packages. He holds a PhD in Management Science from Lancaster University, where he spent more than a decade researching and teaching forecasting and statistics, latterly as Senior Lecturer and the Director of the Centre for Marketing Analytics and Forecasting. He is the author of the ADAM framework and the monograph behind it, and his research spans state-space models, intermittent demand, and supply chain forecasting.
Nikolaos Kourentzes
Nikos is one of the most cited researchers in business forecasting, formerly Professor in predictive analytics at the University of Skövde and at Lancaster University, and now working with Indicio Technologies, a Swedish forecasting software company. His work covers model selection and uncertainty, forecast combination, machine learning, hierarchical forecasting and temporal aggregation, and behavioural forecasting. He is a co-author of Principles of Business Forecasting textbook. Nikos brings the rare combination of shaping the field’s methods and applying them in industry, from supply chains to tourism and healthcare.
Kandrika Pritularga
Kandrika is a Lecturer in Management Science at Lancaster University, with a PhD in business forecasting on mitigating parameter uncertainty. His research connects forecasting directly to the decisions it serves alongside work on model estimation, hierarchical forecasting, and applications in business, healthcare, and tourism. He is a co-maintainer of the legion package for multivariate forecasting.
How we work
Our approach is the same in research, teaching, and consulting: transparency and thorough explanations. The methods we use are published, the software is open source, and the models we build are ones your team can understand, explain, and run without us. We would rather demonstrate exactly how something works than ask you to take it on trust — which is why everything on this site, from the books to the packages, is free.
Want to work with us?
Read about our training, explore the packages, or just get in touch.
Prefer email? Write to mail@openforecast.org