Events You Know About in Advance
The event calendar is the highest-value input a middle-horizon forecast has, and it usually does not exist. What goes in it, who supplies each line, and how to keep it.
An event calendar is a list of dated things that will move demand, and it is the highest-value input a middle-horizon forecast has. Most operations do not have one. The information exists, in four or five people's diaries, and nobody has ever asked for it in one place.
The method in “Events You Know About in Advance” is only as useful as the definitions and source records behind it. A team exploring review the complete product resource for stealth computer monitoring software can add timely work and project context, with transparent settings, limited access and a documented correction route around every consequential use.
Assembling it is a fortnight of conversations and it improves twelve-week accuracy more than any change of method.
Additional context for “Events You Know About in Advance” is available from EY workforce resources. External material is most useful when it prompts a specific validation check rather than replacing local judgement.
What goes in it
Marketing sends and campaigns. Product launches and price changes. Billing and statement runs. Regulatory deadlines. System releases and planned outages. Known outages elsewhere that displace contacts here. Public holidays and school terms. Anything with a date and an expected effect.
- Marketing sends and campaigns; product launches and price changes.
- Billing and statement runs; regulatory deadlines.
- System releases and planned outages.
- Known outages elsewhere that displace contacts here.
- Public holidays and school terms.
Eight categories, four or five sources.
Who supplies each line
Marketing supplies sends. Product supplies launches. Finance supplies billing. Change supplies releases. Facilities supplies closures. HR supplies the holiday calendar.
Each is a standing arrangement rather than a request, which is what makes it survive.
The format
Date or range, what it is, who supplied it, expected effect, and how confident. Five columns, one sheet.
The expected effect is the hard column and it is worth leaving blank rather than guessing: a dated event with no estimate is still useful, because the planner can at least avoid attributing its effect to something else.
Estimating an effect
From the last comparable occurrence, which is why the calendar is kept historically as well as forward. The thirtieth campaign's effect is estimable; the first one's is not.
Keeping the past calendar alongside the demand series is what turns events from surprises into measured drivers.
The event with no precedent
A genuinely new product, a first regulatory deadline. The sponsor's estimate is all there is, it will be high, and the honest treatment is two cases.
Afterwards it becomes a precedent, which is the main reason to record what actually happened.
Keeping it current
A standing item: whoever supplies a line sends updates as dates move, and the planner confirms the next four weeks at each cycle.
Dates move constantly — a campaign slips a week, a release is pulled — and a calendar that is right at the start of the quarter is wrong by the middle of it.
The lapsed calendar
The usual failure. It is assembled, it works for two quarters, the person who maintained it moves, and six months later accuracy has drifted by several points with no apparent cause.
Naming an owner and putting the confirmation into the forecasting cycle is what prevents it.
Displacement rather than addition
An important distinction. Some events add demand; others move it. A system outage on Tuesday does not create Wednesday's extra contacts out of nothing — it defers Tuesday's.
Modelling a displacement as an addition over-forecasts the total and under-forecasts the dip that preceded it.
The event nobody tells you about
There will always be some: an unannounced change, a competitor's failure, something in the news. These are what the band is for.
The calendar does not eliminate surprise; it removes the surprises somebody in the building already knew about, which is most of them.
What the calendar does to a review
It converts "the forecast was 11% under" into "the forecast was 11% under, and the release on the fourteenth was not in the calendar". That is a finding with an owner and a fix.
Without the calendar, the same miss is attributed to the model.
Where to keep it
Wherever everybody can see it, including the people supplying lines. A shared sheet beats a file in the planning folder, because the suppliers will correct it themselves when they can see it.
The visibility is also what makes people remember to send updates.
The event that is somebody else's outage
Underrated and often large. A supplier, a partner or a regulator having a bad week displaces contacts onto you, and nobody in your organisation is watching their status page.
Where the dependency is material, the planner should be on the notification list. It costs a subscription and it has saved more than one quarter.
Recording what actually happened
The forward calendar and the backward one are the same file. After each event, the observed effect is written next to the expected one.
Thirty rows of that is what turns the next estimate from a guess into an average, and it is the only way the calendar improves rather than simply persisting.
What a calendar is worth
In one operation's own figures, assembling a calendar and folding it into the twelve-week forecast reduced the mean error from about eleven per cent to about seven, with no change of method.
That is a larger improvement than most modelling projects deliver, for a fortnight of conversations and a shared sheet. One employer's own experience, not a benchmark.