Supporting Business Decisions Through Standard Forecasting Practices: A Case Study in a Greek Tobacco Distribution Company

Sudden market changes have made traditional approaches on forecasting obsolete. Usually, managers put a great deal of trust into their own forecasting expertise, bypassing standard practices of forecasting. A leading company in Greek tobacco distribution market adopted successfully a new forecasting model that can produce accurate forecasts for a wide range of industrial processes, by simply including in the forecasting process a set of standard, well known but usually overlooked practices. The purpose of this paper is to introduce this simple forecasting model and to demonstrate the potential benefit from the adoption of some classic practices in the business forecasting process. The SLR model, which was initially used in the tobacco distribution company, was used as a benchmark in order to test the validity of our approach. The development of such models can provide a useful input to both marketing and operations planning in future.