Improvement Proposal for Spare Part Sales Forecasting Process

Abstract

The future is always uncertain. The case company, a large industrial technology company operating in marine business, has been having difficulties forecasting the sales of its spare parts products. Inaccurate sales forecasts have led to problems with supply chain management. To improve the situation the objective of the thesis was to propose an improved sales forecasting process. The scope of the thesis was limited to the case company’s spare parts sales team in Finland.

For this study, applied action research is used as the research approach with qualitative data collection methods. At first, a comprehensive data collection round was performed to analyze the current state of the sales forecasting process. The key findings of the analysis were the following: the sales opportunity data in the CRM system was not up to date and forecasts of the daily operational spares sales were not at an adequate level. To address these challenges, a conceptual framework was developed of best practices from literature.

Based on the findings from the current state analysis and the conceptual framework, an initial proposal was developed by co-creating it with the relevant stakeholders of the process. The proposal was then validated after gathering feedback. The outcome of the proposal is a RACI chart to identify the roles and responsibilities of the process. The recommendation is a shift of responsibilities on a few process steps from the sales team leader to the sales team members to increase the efficiency of the whole forecasting process. The proposal includes materials to support the transfer of the responsibilities. The proposal also includes a recommendation to employ quantitative method to forecast the daily operational spares sales and methods to measure the forecast accuracy.