Abstract 

 We Sell Everything in Software’ WSES Inc. is a products company and specializes in software solutions for different industries such as defense, clinical research, consumer goods, capital markets, security, banks, and insurance among others. One of the divisions of WSES focuses on enterprise software product. 

 Every quarter, Jack Williams, CEO had to give forecast of sales to the stakeholders for the enterprise software product division. The forecast which he had given for the last quarter was USD 2.4 billion whereas the actual sales booking was only USD 1.48 Billion. Jack wanted more accurate forecasting of sales and he had a discussion with Michael Summers, the CFO. Michael explained to Jack that this was something which was not in his hand since he was taking the numbers from Ben Osborne, Vice President of Marketing.

Learning Objective (Maximum of 500 Characters):  Briefly describes teaching goals of case.

The case focuses on finding an analytics approach to forecast sales based on historical data. The primary learning objectives can be the following:

1. Understand the use of Markov chain in the business context: The case discusses conversion of data into a transition probability matrix and use of absorbing state Markov chain to understand how opportunities are moving across the various states
2. Understand the applicability of Markov chain to predict what percentage of opportunities in each stage will get absorbed as ‘‘contract signing’’ and what percentage of opportunities will get absorbed as ‘‘lost’’.

Ben explained to Jack that the process they were following was taking the last quarter’s sales and adding their estimate of 1.5% to it. Jack did not approve of this method. He felt that since WSES has such rich sales data over the years, they should be having a way to hear what the data is saying. They engaged Mark, with Ph.D. in Statistics, to understand if they could find a structured way to forecast the sales number based on historical data available with WSES.