The reason the forward is necessary is each email that is fetched will then be deleted after it has gone through your routing rules to create the ticket. This will prevent from multiple tickets being opened for the same emails each time the email fetcher service is ran. By creating the forward you are now able to keep a copy of each email else where and fetch the emails without multiple tickets being opened per email.
Below is an example of how to create a forward in cPanel:

From now on, any email sent to: support@ceupgrade.com, will also be forwarded to email-archive@ceupgrade.com