A number of multiple-parameter adaptive exponential smoothing models have been proposed and demonstrated over the last two decades for short range forecasting. There have been conflicting results on their performance and no systematic study has been conducted to compare them in a controlled environment. The work reported here fills this void by testing a set of well known multiple-parameter adaptive procedures against the three-parameter Winters' model. First, sets of synthetic time series with known characteristics are used to compare performance for the different approaches using the standard deviation of forecast errors. Second, the information gathered at this point is used to predict the technique's performance on six empirical time series. And third, general guidelines are presented for model selection.