Sales forecasting management

The purpose of this research is to investigate current company business process from sales forecasting perspective and provide potential improvements of how to deal with unstable market demand and increase overall precision of forecasting. The problem which company face is an unstable market demand and not enough precision in sales forecasting process. Therefore the research questions are:  How current forecasting process can be improved?  What methods, can be implemented in order to increase the precision of forecasting? Study can be described as an action research using an abductive approach supported by combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis practices. In order to achieve high degree of reliability the study was based on verified scientific literature and data collected from the case company while collaborating with company’s COO. Research exposed the current forecasting process of the case company. Different forecasting methods were chosen according to the existing circumstances and analyzed in order to figure out which could be implemented in order to increase forecasting precision and forecasting as a whole. Simple exponential smoothing showed the most promising accuracy results, which were measured by applying MAD, MSE and MAPE measurement techniques. Moreover, trend line analysis was applied as well, as a supplementary method. For the reason that the case company presents new products to the market limited amount of historical data was available. Therefore simple exponential smoothing technique did not show accurate results as desired. However, suggested methods can be applied for testing and learning purposes, supported by currently applied qualitative methods.