It immediately became apparent that the forecasting method was not the problem at all. The organization was producing one thing, it was selling something else (resulting in stockouts for some items and excess inventory in other items), and the firm was budgeting for other production levels. The forecast model was not the problem, but the problem was the lack of a basic agreement on which was the correct forecast, resulting in excess inventories in some products and shortages in others. A simplistic interpretation of this situation is that they had too many forecasts; however, each functional area used the forecast for their own purposes. To some degree, each function felt they were justified in developing their ``own'' forecast. When each separate functional area generates a forecast for a different purpose, the result is