When planning production and establishing the marketing strategy in the short and medium term, the manager's first considerations are: Quantitative projective forecasting methods use historical data to estimate future sales. This expensive and slow method of predicting time series is also one of the most accurate, although it is the most suitable for forecasting in terms of 18 months or less. Since medium-term forecasts are more likely to abstract away from these cyclical factors than short-term forecasts, forecasting GDP growth in the medium term requires an idea of the level at which the economy will converge and of the speed of convergence towards this level. Central or timely forecasts are adequately complemented by a broader set of debates on medium-term issues, including risk assessments described with fan charts and alternative scenarios to reference projections based on central forecasts.
Overall, the evaluation concludes that the IMF's medium-term forecasts of GDP growth in the WEO meet the basic standards of forecast efficiency in most countries, with little evidence of built-in organizational bias. The overall quality of the IMF's medium-term forecasts for GDP growth is acceptable, although there is more room for improvement compared to short-term forecasts. In a service company, for example, you can use a forecast to ensure that there are enough front desk employees to meet the fluctuating demand that often involves meeting immediate requests for customer service. However, there are problems with medium-term forecasts for a significant number of member countries, many of them the same as those that Timmermann (200) identified in the context of the forecasts for the current and next year.
In the IMF's medium-term forecasts, serial correlation is less common than bias, limiting the possibilities of using past errors to help improve forecasts. The survey conducted by the evaluation team revealed that more than half of the respondents from the private sector think that, for policy debates, the IMF's medium-term forecasts are more important than short-term forecasts. Although there is a tendency towards excessive optimism in the IMF's forecasts of GDP growth in the medium term from a statistical point of view, the conditions regarding the reliability of the statistical tests of accuracy and efficiency that are highlighted in Fausto (201) and that have already been mentioned in the analysis of short-term forecasts should be taken into account. Forecasting allows e-commerce merchants to ensure that they have the right amount of products in stock, avoid backorders and out of stock in warehouses, and improve customer service.
Changes in supply and demand for various foods can cause you to put your sales forecast back on the drawing board. If you are forecasting the sales of a restaurant that you have been managing for a few years, you already have historical data that will help you plan the forecast for your restaurant. Here, the authors try to explain the potential of forecasting to managers, paying special attention to the sales forecast of Corning Glass Works products, as they have matured throughout the product life cycle.
