Increased company performance through macroeconomics sales forecasting: A case study

Traditional planning in the business environment is used to allocate and coordinate resources mainly on basis of company-internal data. Thereby, a general weakness is that macroeconomic changes, due to business cycles, are not taken into consideration and the chance to take advantage of the associated effects on the revenues of an individual enterprise is missed. Including a macroeconomic trend analysis in business planning fosters the objectivity to create a solid basis for a corporate decision-making process. This paper deals with the Economic Trend Outlook Model which allows to consider macroeconomic influences on the company-specific capacity planning. In doing so, a company can turn into a proactive organization that makes use of advanced trend information and improves the individual forecasting accuracy. Thus this paper describes the method behind this strategy and introduces a stepwise approach using the examples of two company cases.