The primary benefit of benchmarking is to check the overall health of your forecasting efforts. This health check is not only important, but also essential to an organization's long term forecasting success enabling you to measure your current position against industry standards.

Table of contents:

1. Why Benchmarking?
2. Data Used
3. Why Forecast Error?
4. Improving Forecasts
5. Characteristics of Errors
6. Forecasting Errors When All Industries Are Combined
7. Forecasting Errors in the Consumer Products Industry
8. Forecasting Errors in the Food & Beverages Industry