Multilevel forecasting improves corporate planning and operations

Forecasting involves estimating future values for a process that is at least partially uncontrollable. Examples range from weather to election results and stock prices. An important subfield of forecasting is sales forecasting, where one tries to forecast the sales of products usually targeted to the consumer market. Although different actors in the supply chain -producers, wholesale companies and retail companies - all have ways of affecting the sales such as marketing and pricing, important uncertainty factors remain due to eg consumer behavior and the actions of competitors.