Jury of Expert Opinion
This article covers meaning, importance & example of Jury of Expert Opinion from marketing perspective.
What is Jury of Expert Opinion?
Jury of expert opinion is one of the methods for forecasting sales qualitatively where executives from different streams of business provide their inputs. Jury of expert opinion considers experts from Marketing, Sales, HR, Finance, Operations, Production department, who discuss and provide their opinions and experience to the board of directors as high level executes are well acquainted with the strengths and weaknesses of the firm and what changes need to be done.
The discussions happen through meetings where the decision is taken after all of them come to a common consensus. Jury of expert opinion method is usually followed when there is a complex issue and the top-level expertise are required to come into a conclusion. Here, it adds and averages the opinions and views of all and the final decision comes out to be a rough average estimate without using any statistical techniques.
This method is very simple and quick to execute but in many cases it is subjected to biases that results in poor forecasts.
Importance of Jury of Expert Opinion
Jury of expert opinion is used as one of the qualitative methods for demand forecasting. It permits the inclusion of soft information such as human factors, personal opinions and hunches. Managers and executives come from different divisions and departments to forecast what will be the demand for the subsequent period and accordingly estimate sales for the given period of time. Top level managers use their experience and specialization to arrive at final forecast.
The measure of forecast in Jury of expert opinion is obtained by averaging out the opinions given by all the experts.
The forecasted demand is an input for sales and operations. The sales divisions provide insights on how much they can sell in a given time period and whether the forecasted value is feasible. Similarly the operations division estimate how much production can be carried out in that same given period of time. Therefore the jury’s judgment provides a platform to maintain transparency and allows communication among various departments within an organization.
Jury of expert opinion amalgamates opinions of top level executives based on their years of experience. These experts have profound knowledge about their organization’s strengths and weaknesses, what are the risk factors in the related industry and an overall general knowledge of how economic factors can affect the previously determined sales trend. The aim is to minimize error. No doubt it has some obvious advantages like it provides deeper insights but it has some disadvantages as well.
Advantages & Disadvantages of Jury of Expert Opinion
Some advantages are:
1. This method is useful for a company which is innovating new products.
2. Very quick and simple process and it is easily done through holding meetings periodically.
3. Collective decision is been taken considering the opinions of all the top level executives.
4. Useful for small business because of the simplicity of this method.
A few disadvantages of Jury of expert opinion are:
1. Its opinion and experience oriented not based on facts.
2. There can be biased opinions.
3. The responsibility of the decision is distributed among all the executives and no single person will be liable for any faulty forecast.
Similarity Between Jury of Expert Opinion and Delphi Method
Delphi Method is also a similar kind of forecasting method where expert opinions are taken into consideration for forecasting future decisions and sales but it is done in a more formal manner than the jury of expert opinion method. In this method, the experts have to fill questionnaires and surveys. The after reviewing all the responses and answers, applicable changes are made and this process is repeated three to four times until a final conclusion is reached.
Example of Jury of Expert Opinion
An information-technology based company wants to forecast the units of computer required for next month. So, it summoned a weekly committee to estimate the orders for the previous twelve months and also the orders that estimated to come in for the next four weeks. The committee was made up of operations and marketing analysts and managers from R&D. They would conduct their meetings every Saturday morning reviewing the number of orders that were previously determined and check the accuracy of the forecasted demand and accordingly determine the demand for the subsequent period. Based on the material release order and spreadsheets of data, each member of the committee would indicate forecasts for the next four weeks. The forecasts would then be averaged to arrive at a final result.
Hence, this concludes the definition of Jury of Expert Opinion along with its overview.
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