The company's sales forecasting and safety stocks systems should be central planks in its operations - polished and professional, driving planning and production on a regular monthly basis. But all too often they are rather piecemeal affairs, with outdated methods and seat-of-the-pants management controls.

Course Agenda:

Sales Demand Patterns: Obtaining a better picture of true customer demand • The pattern of data including seasonality, cycles and trend.

The Averaging Techniques: Representing the patterns in data by statistical formulae • The 'naïve' family of techniques, including the famous 'exponential smoothing' methods • How to deal with products having lumpy demand.

The Causal Techniques: How the modern Box-Jenkins and Bayesian methods establish a cause and effect relationship between the past and future. NB - Mathematical proofs will not be gone through during any part of this course.

Marketing Knowledge: Special marketing events which break the pattern of sales - promotions, trade fairs, price offers • Incorporating the information into the formal system and measuring the effectiveness of the intervention • New and dying products • Product launches.

Safety Stocks: Analysing the pattern of forecast errors to derive safety stocks • How safety stocks provide management control over the cost of customer service • Relating the theory to practical measures.

Miscellaneous topics: Consensus and Delphi techniques • Substitutes and ranges • The role of forecasts in the master plan • The location and quantity of safety stock in a logistics network.

Implementing the System: The balance between complexity of technique and staff controls • Principal packages currently available today - and how to select one.

This course is available only as an "in-house" presentation. Please enquire for details.