Inside Story
And the Survey Says ...
Peter Horner, editor
horner@lionhrtpub.com
Software surveys are one of the more time-consuming editorial endeavors we routinely undertake at OR/MS Today. We start the process by developing a questionnaire in conjunction with our invited author/expert. We keep the questionnaire simple so that anyone familiar with the product can fill it out in about 15 minutes. We then check previous survey lists, our in-house database and resource directory, the Internet and other sources to identify as many appropriate vendors as possible. Depending on the type of software we're surveying, we will send out 100 or more questionnaires.
That's when the fun begins.
In the good old days, we used to "snail-mail" the questionnaires and include a self-addressed, stamped envelope for the return. Then we got smart and started faxing the questionnaires and encouraging faxed returns, theoretically cutting our turnaround time to a matter of days. Now we e-mail the questionnaires and encourage e-mail returns. With e-mail, we could theoretically send out 100 questionnaires and collect data from 100 different vendors in a matter of minutes.
Yeah, right. The operative word here is "theoretically." As any operations researcher who hasn't spent his or her lifetime in the bowels of the science building tweaking an algorithm knows, there is literally a world of difference between theory and real life. Everything works in theory; things rarely go as planned in the real world.
We include a cover letter with the questionnaire that explains who we are, what we're doing, why we're doing it, what we need and when we need it. The deadline comes and goes, and we consider ourselves lucky if we've heard from 15 percent of our targeted vendors. At that point, we send out a reminder e-mail. When that fails to move the masses, we jump on the phone.
Without fail, some of the larger companies who may not be familiar with OR/MS Today will switch our call over to someone in the public relations department, and the PR person will tell us that the company sells "supply chain management" software, not the "forecasting" software we're surveying. True, but did they know that their SCM software also includes a nice forecasting feature that belongs in our survey? Sometimes we can break through the confusion, and sometimes we can't.
Later, after the survey is completed and the issue has been published, a marketing maven from at least one such company will call us. Of course he'll want to know why we didn't include his company's software in our survey.
Pace University's Jack Yurkiewicz has provided the expertise behind our forecasting surveying campaign for many years. His latest thoughts on the trends that are shaping the forecasting frontier, as well as his advice on how to pick a forecasting package that fits your individual needs, begin on page 44.
Thanks largely to the efforts of managing editor Jennie Farnsworth, we collected data on 27 forecasting packages for the survey that accompanies Yurkiewicz's article. As Jack notes, the list is "almost surely not comprehensive" for all of the reasons mentioned above, but it's a good start.
OR/MS Today copyright © 2003 by the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. All rights reserved.
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