ABSTRACT
The pharmaceutical industry has become more circumspect about publishing internal company estimates of forecast potential for new products. Forecasting feeds into and influences many other functional areas within an organisation. The speed with which financial–and increasingly legal–markets respond to forecasts has dissuaded pharmaceutical companies from publishing internal forecast data. The link between forecasting sales revenue and unit volume is an obvious one; however, the form of the forecast required may differ between these two. History provides few comprehensive and simple solutions for forecasting in the future. In most organisations the role of business development relies upon the ability to quantify these opportunities–a forecasting function. The application of options valuation techniques–long used in assessing the equities markets–are starting to find a place in pharmaceutical product forecasting. In the sales and marketing areas, forecasts are used to drive resource allocation decisions.
