OPEN JOURNAL OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT ...

Open Journal of Knowledge Management
relevant business topics (estimate the sales of new products). Since Tchibo was asking its employees
for help on a real business issue this signaled that Tchibo values and appreciates the knowledge
of its employees.
In addition to this theme of appreciation, Tchibo also introduced an element of competition by using
rankings which would show the weekly top forecasters from across the organization.
Finally, some small material incentives were added in the form of Amazon vouchers which would
reward the monthly top forecasters.
Once these measure were in place, the Social Forecasting process was launched. Each week
shop managers, warehouse workers and employees from HQ visited the Social Forecasting portal
and made their sales predictions for the upcoming new products (see Fig. 3).
Fig. 3: Forecasting process for new products with Social Forecasting (Source: Author)
The predictions from the crowd where available immediately after the closing of the forecast. No
market research or test sales were required to derive these forecasts. After an initial ramp-up
phase the actual sales figures started to arrive each week. These were entered into the system
which then automatically calculated the top forecasters – those whose forecasts were closest to
the actual sales figures. This gave a boost to participation and was very well received by employees
(Preller and Rudzinski, 2009).
Evaluating Social Forecasting vs. Traditional Forecasting
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The Social Forecasting process was launched along the existing forecasting process for new
products to allow for a direct comparison of the performance of both approaches. When the actual
sales figures came in the project team computed the forecasting accuracy of both approaches.
Table 1 shows the forecasting accuracy from both approaches. The established new product
evaluation process had a forecasting accuracy of 87% while the new Social Forecasting process
achieved 81% in its first five weeks (Preller and Rudzinski, 2009).