5.1 Case Study

5.1 Developing Sales Forecasts

1. A few recommendations would serve very useful to Mr. Perez for developing more precise sales forecasts. First, the same method should not be used for each of the chemical group’s division. Because the market is so different in each division, some techniques will not work for one division like it would for another. For example a test market may work for a division with a brand new product, but it would not be as helpful or efficient for a division where there has been steady growth and established products for five years.

2. The AKAMAI Corporation is known to have diversified products classified into chemicals, plastics and aluminum. Their strategy of commercial introduction for replacing the declining products shows that they follow the stability strategy. The forecasts would help the company anticipate the future and the growth trend of the three divisions. It is often advisable to use at least two different methods of forecasting. For the chemicals division, I would prefer the Controlled Experiments- test marketing to know how the products have impact and how the future sales would be, Secondly using the market survey for chemical industry would be ideal to forecast. For the plastics division, I feel that the procedure of collective opinion, which gives the opinion of sales force and the experts in the field depending on the market and the present sale of our products, would be ideal. The Delphi method would help us do survey and understand our buyers, customers and market trend, which would help to forecast the sales. Lastly, the aluminum products can be forecasted by the projections and the market survey studies. On other hand, the use of Economic indicators would also impact the forecast of all the three divisions as the mathematics and statistics would give us a scope to project the sales based on the market and industry. We need to identify the relation between the demand for our products and the economic indicator....