That said, the task of creating reliable sales forecasts is far from easy. The ideal situation for a manufacturer is that all of its retail customers provide order forecasts or supplier schedules. Today manufacturers may be receiving store-level DRP supplier schedules from some retailers, which should be the most reliable projections they have. If these retailers and large customers, the forecasts are immediately beneficial for production planning and they provide the basis for additional CPFR activities between the partners. Other retailers may provide automatically calculated order forecasts based upon DC activities, but these forecasts rely upon historical DC shipment to store rather than a multi-echelon store-level forecast methodology. A third group of retailers may not provide any insight to manufacturers on future order. For this group, the manufacturer has no information, except its historical shipment data, on which to base a demand forecast. In this case, the manufacturer must independently forecast the demand plan for these retailers.