An Evaluation of the Potential of Bayesian Sales Forecasting in Improving the Long-term Marketing and Management Performance of UK Pharmaceutical Firms

Management needs to deal with increasing uncertainty of environmental changes to make critical and important decisions about the future in the present time. Sales forecasting is fundamental to management's ability to plan, budget and control. It is not a question of whether managers should forecast or not; but the main question is how they are to do so, and this fact is applicable to all organisations in all industries.
Understanding of forecasting approaches and tools is crucial to carry out managerial activities such as data acquisition, data audits, links with formal planning procedures and other management systems, maintenance of existing applications, and identification and implementation of new applications.
The latest studies indicate that defects with forecasting do not lie in technical areas but in the gap between forecasters (producers) and managers (users); which is mainly because the forecasters might not be able to understand the managers' needs, and the managers are not capable of understanding the forecasting techniques especially complicated ones. Consequently, this has led to a gap in communication that caused ill-matched forecasts and unavoidable results.