sales forecasting software

Sales forecasting software that relies on only statistical forecasting techniques could be a dead end - demand forecasting software should able able to accommodate commonsense and experience. There are many techniques and algorithms that can be used to improve the accuracy of your predictions - including commonsense. Lead indicators such as the number of building permits - along with any historical lags between permits and industry activity are excellent for say the building industry and related trades. Rules of thumb include taking previous results and adjusting these for known influences - but unless this is done product by product with educated estimates about the effect of known influences on each major product this approach has limited use - it is not too different to simply "adding 10%" to last years actuals. Sales forecasting software that relies on only statistical forecasting techniques could be a dead end - demand forecasting software should able able to accommodate commonsense and experience.

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Predictive techniques that go into more detail likely to provide better overall results because the final estimates tend to be an amalgam of 'reasonableness' across various departments. Sales forecasting software that relies on only statistical forecasting techniques could be a dead end - demand forecasting software should able able to accommodate commonsense and experience. One proven technique is to take distortion-free historical data that has been smoothed (using techniques like exponential smoothing) to predict recent actuals product by product - the most accurate technique for each product is the one that you use to predict the near future for each product - and the combined effect becomes your overall estimate. It is often as hard to get a marketing team interested in monthly predictions so that they coordinate with manufacturing - in fact it is often a challenge to get a manufacturing department to believe predictions when they are produced. That said, once the selling team and operations teams planning process is operating in tandem, both groups soon begin to appreciate that planning is the best way to make their respective lives easier and more predictable - not perfect - but predictable. Sales forecasting software that relies on only statistical forecasting techniques could be a dead end - demand forecasting software should able able to accommodate commonsense and experience.