Marketed Product Forecasting

Business Planning Needs Accurate Forecasting

Once a product is marketed, the forecasting emphasis shifts from purely strategic forecasting to a combination of long-term forecasts and accurately predicting near-term sales (one to five years out).

Accurate sales forecasts are vital to effectively allocating sales and marketing effort, gauging manufacturing capacity, setting budgets, and managing investors’ expectations.

Powerful Yet Flexible

Objective Insights bases our short-term forecasts on demand trends in the marketplace, typically calculated from data like prescriptions or unit shipments that are measured as close to the patient as possible. We also separate out factors like shipping days per month and package size to ensure the trend truly reflects underlying product demand.

Since product trends only reflect what has happened in the past, Objective Insights augments the trends with future events in our short-term models. Events include factors like future competition, promotional campaigns, labeling changes, and price changes.

Our short-term models also include analysis of disparities between end-user demand and ex-manufacturer sales. This helps you to detect and quantify customer buying activity so your company can be prepared for sales fluctuations due to wholesaler buy-in and buy-out or other supply chain fluctuations.

State-of-the-Art Forecasting Techniques

Objective Insights uses widely accepted, advanced forecasting techniques like exponential smoothing and Box Jenkins (ARIMA) to determine product trends. We also employ a number of methods to process data prior to trending in order to produce more predictive trends.

Trend Testing Yields Optimal Results

If your product has sufficient sales history, Objective Insights tests different trending methods on past sales periods to determine which methods best predict actual sales. This process further enhances the reliability of the forecast.

Rapid Forecast Updates

Once the forecast model has been finalized, Objective Insights can run future forecasts in a matter of minutes if there are no changes to underlying assumptions. We simply incorporate the latest monthly sales data, rerun the sales trends, and your forecast is ready to go!

Epidemiology-Based Models

For longer term, strategic forecasts, Objective Insights employs patient-based and epidemiology-based forecast models. These models can be structured using the simpler sequential segment approach or, in more complex situations, models are structured to account for the dynamics of patients moving between disease stages, progressing through lines of therapy, and switching between therapies. We typically use a cohort modeling approach or a Markov chain for patient dynamics models.