Forecast Pro Sales Forecasting Brings Success To Sports Company
The strengths of Forecast Pro as a selling forecasting software mean that it can solve a number of challenges for a broad spectrum of businesses. As the world’s best selling forecasting software, Forecast Pro is used in industries like manufacturing, retail, pharmaceutical, electronics, oil, gas, property, municipal, government, and finance.
As a sports design company that develops high performance running footwear and apparel, Brooks Sports products are sold in 80 countries worldwide. In 2001, the company shifted from producing a broad product range to producing selected high performance products targeted at serious runners. When this took place, it became clear that the forecasting process needed to change in order to support the strategic direction of the company.
What challenges did this retail company face in sales forecasting?
The change in business strategy meant that a number of challenges were created. These included inconsistent style growth, where the new line of products experienced anything from 0 to 50 percent growth annually. There was also a long production planning horizon, and a short product life, which posed planning problems, and also increasing on demand orders, which are placed for immediate shipment – previously these orders accounted for 20% of all orders, now they account for 50%.
Accurate and timely sales forecasts are demanded from management. In order to accommodate this demand, the forecasting process had to be completely revamped and redesigned. After much planning and research, Forecast Pro was chosen due to its ability to create accurate forecasts, choose forecast models or let the software choose the models, ability to model events, support multiple level models for consistent forecasting, and a powerful override facility to facilitate collaborative forecasting.
Forecast Pro has worked out for Brooks as a brilliant solution. Forecast accuracy has improved by 40%, unfulfilled demand has been lowered dramatically, from 20% to fewer than 5%. Closeouts have also been reduced by more than 60%. Costs have been lowered and margins improved.
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