Best practices in demand forecasting: tests of Universalistic, contingency and configurational theories

Matteo Kalchschmidt ()

No 1102, Working Papers from Department of Management, Information and Production Engineering, University of Bergamo

Abstract: While the literature on demand forecasting has examined the best practices in the field, the interpretation and definition of best practices can be difficult due to the different perspectives that the literature has adopted. First, a universalistic perspective can be considered because some specific practices are really best regardless of the context, the forecasting problems, etc. Some other contributions have also taken a contingent approach, which states that best practices depend on the specific kind of company considered or the forecasting scenario. A third potential perspective is the configurational one, which asserts that best practices depend on a set of factors. In this work, we plan to study which of these perspectives really holds true and to what extent they do so. Analysis is conducted by collecting data of more than 500 companies in different countries via the GMRG IV questionnaire. The impact of forecasting is studied in terms of operational performance by designing and testing different sets of propositions that underline the three aforementioned perspectives.

Keywords: Forecasting; GMRG; universalistic theory; contingency theory; configuration theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
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