As a company who excels in agriculture, nutrition & health, and home & personal care, it is important for BASF to have the ability to forecast future market conditions. One of which is forecasting customers' demand. Poor forecasting would create problems in the management of product availability, namely the lack of availability of stock quantities or the amount of excess product stocks. Lack of available stock quantities may result in unfulfilled requests from customers, while producing excess stocks may result in losses. Hence, the aim of this study is to compare the demand forecast for Softex 1400-M, a product manufactured by BASF, using the Single Moving Average and Single Exponential Smoothing method by applying Mean Absolute Deviation, Mean Square Error, and Mean Absolute Percentage Error. The method applied in this study is a quantitative method. Based on the testing result, the method which often depicts the best result is Single Moving Average Method with periods length is 5.   The demand forecast can support BASF to prevent excess or shortage of product stocks.

Keywords

Demand Forecasting, Single Exponential Smoothing, Single Moving Average, and Quantitative Method.