One of the most common statistics used by Wall St. analysts to predict future sales for publicly-held retailers is by examining past sales performance. While that type of information is, in fact, helpful for predicting future performance, previous sales histories typically fail to incorporate how sales were achieved. These types of shortcomings prompted Saravanan Kesavan, assistant professor of operations, technology and innovation management at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, to explore whether operational components such as inventory and gross margin data can be applied to more accurately forecast future business performance. Kesavan co-authored a research paper on the topic with Vishal Gaur, associate professor of operations management at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University along with Ananth Raman, Read More
Monthly Archives: January 2011
Lessons for multinationals targeting emerging economies
Big-box retailers might have a lot of pull in western economies. But small merchants are nonetheless the dominant form of retailing globally, and businesses of all sizes can stand to learn quite a bit from them about making inventory decisions in emerging economies based on heuristics and not sophisticated analytical techniques. Sridhar Balasubramanian, associate dean of the UNC Kenan-Flagler MBA program and associate professor of marketing, recently co-authored research that explores the practices and performance of small retail stores in Brazil and other emerging economies. The study was conducted over several years with co-author Tomasz Lenartowicz, associate professor of international business at Barry Kaye College of Business at Florida Atlantic University. One of the reasons Balasubramanian and Lenartowicz decided to Read More