Option #1: Forecasting Sales, Specializing in Producing VR

Forecasting sales
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Forecasting Sales
It has become indispensable for businesses to forecast sales and make strategic decisions that align their goals with their vision based on these forecasts. Most industries are characterized by seasonality, sudden changes in demand levels, price-cutting maneuvers of the competition, strikes, and large swings of the economy and managers have to be adept in steering the business to weather these imminent challenges CITATION Joh71 \l 1033 (Chambers, Mullick, & Smith, 1971). Since businesses rely on sales to operate, forecasting sales therefore enables the business to plan how to increase their sales for higher revenues to cover operational cost and profit margins. Since products are diverse and at different stages in their life cycle, it is imperative each company to produce a model that best befits the product. Each forecasting model has different formula in their forecasts but some are more inclusive and relatable to your business model that give the best dependable results CITATION Cha05 \l 1033 (Jain & Malehorn, 2005). To elucidate this subject further, a case study of VentureBeat, a company specializing in producing VR (virtual reality) kits is analyzed in their sales forecast model and how they can improve their sales.
The aptness of choosing VentureBeat is partly because it is a new entrant to the market and there are other competing companies like HTC Vive and Occulus Rift owned by Facebook Inc. VR technology has fallen below the expectation as per earlier predictions, though the industry has promising potential for growth. For a new product in the market, many challenges are to be expected early in production and marketing and VR companies face this hurdle including VentureBeat. The problem VR companies face is there is no recorded statistics that show how to accurately verify if their model will work since they are working with new products.
For VentureBeat, a qualitative approach to determine their sales forecast would entail information about special events of the VR kits and may or may not take the past into consideration CITATION Pra10 \l 1033 (Chandra, 2010). This is mainly done by analytical experts who use sophisticated statistically based tools to predict their sales and advice on best marketing strategy. They can also use time series and projection model that focuses entirely on patterns and pattern changes, and thus relies entirely on historical data. Alternatively, they can use casual models that utilize highly refined and specific information about relationships between system elements, factoring in special events and technological breakthroughs that can threaten their sales. Once the parameters of sales forecast of the company are set, they adopt one forecast system model and compute the...