The Perfect Store Sales Forecast White Paper

What really counts: Accuracy or Agility?

The purpose of this white paper is to show that creating a “good” store sales forecast is very useful but when coupled with a very responsive supply chain its value is that much greater. Companies focused on demand sensing and creating supply chain processes to support rapid responses are far more successful than those companies chasing the “perfect” store forecast.

Smart companies understand that a forecast is just one of many equally important components of a responsive supply chain. Since a forecast will always be just a guess and a store forecast will always be wrong, the company that is the most responsive to the change in demand will always be more successful.

This explains why so many companies today are more focused on becoming demand driven versus improving forecast accuracy. Many retailers have spent millions of dollars and years of time trying to create the perfect store sales forecast. Their efforts have proven to be an expensive exercise in futility because they were based on the assumption that creating the perfect store forecast would yield 100% product availability at the lowest cost.

These retailers not only proved this theory to be flawed but also that creating a perfect forecast is not feasible. What their efforts did show, however, is that the ability to react to a change in demand both rapidly and profitably is in fact the true Holy Grail.

The Perfect Store Sales Forecast

KEYWORDS:
sales forecast, retail forecast, forecasting store sales, responsive supply chain, demand driven supply chain