Strategic Human Resource Management

Section Three

Table 3-1
Supply Forecasting Techniques

Percentage of Companies
Using Technique

Succession Planning or Replacement Charts

Human Resource Inventories

Supervisor Estimates

Rules of Thumb or Nonstatistical Formulas

Computer Simulation

Renewal Models

Regression Analysis

Markov or Network Flow Models

Exponential Smoothing or Trend Extrapolation

Operations Research Techniques

66.7

66.7

48.5

27.3

12.1

9.1

7.6

6.1

6.1

4.5

Source: Extracted from Charles R. Greer, Dana L. Jackson, and Jack Fiorito. “Adapting
Human Resource Planning in a Changing Business Environment,” Human Resource
Management 28, no. 1 (1989): 110. Copyright © 1989 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Reprinted by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Nonetheless, many companies have human resource
forecasters, often possessing doctoral degrees, who do
sophisticated, large-scale organization-wide forecasts of their
organizations’ internal supplies of human resources. These
forecasts are not necessarily replaceable by the trend toward