Abstract
Effective sales forecasting and demand planning (SF&DP) across the supply chain can bring a host of benefits. Specifically, it can help reduce inventories, speed up product flows, increase revenues and profits. Having the goal of highlighting the critical issues in the management of the SF&DP process along with the best practices found in world-class organizations, this paper reports the results of a two-phases research performed on over 100 companies in Italy. Results show which departments are mainly involved the SF&DP process and how different managerial approaches can influence the effectiveness of the forecast performance. The cross industry analysis, carried out in the beverage, grocery non-food and pharmaceutical industries, can help supply chain managers to better understand their own "as-is" status and how the same issue has been approached and solved in a different business environment.