Forecasting for planning

Forecasting is important to planning in a number of ways, such as the projection of environments, sales, costs, or profits for new or established products. However, the techniques used in, and the approach to, forecasting may be quite different for established versus new products. For established products the main objective may be to understand and project relatively stable conditions (assuming no major upsets); for new products the objective may be to forecast how the product will be accepted in a new or changing market. Furthermore, the forecaster must understand how new environmental conditions will affect both the factors to be forecasted and the changing needs of the decision‐maker.