BESTPro: A System for Estimating Baselines, Event, Seasonality, Trend, and Promotion Effects On Sales Data

BESTPro: A System for Estimating Baselines, Event, Seasonality, Trend, and Promotion Effects On Sales Data

This report describes BESTPro, a system for measuring baselines of "normal" merchandise sales, event effects, seasonality, trend and promotional effects on sales data. The baseline is an estimate for what the total sales of a product group would have been had no promotion been run. BESTPro provides a systematic procedure for measuring incremental sales due to promotions by first applying an iterative procedure to compute the seasonality and the trend for grouped merchandises. An extrapolation approach is next used to develop baselines by projecting forward from "normal" periods that were not affected by promotions. The incremental sales due to promotions can then be evaluated by comparing the baselines and the sales data.