Patent ID: 7292991

Claim:
A method for disambiguating historical point-of-sale data to enhance forecasting accuracy, the method comprising: receiving point-of-sale quantities for a plurality of individual items; receiving a point-of-sale quantity for a miscellaneous group item, wherein the miscellaneous group item comprises a plurality of differing individual items in a group, and wherein the point-of-sale quantity includes undifferentiated sales of one or more of the individual items in the group; calculating an item index for each individual item comprising a fraction of miscellaneous group item sales attributable to the individual item; and computing a revised point-of-sale quantity for each individual item using the item index and the point-of-sale quantities for the miscellaneous group item and the individual item; and forecasting future demand for at last one individual item based on the revised point-of-sale quantity for the at least one individual item.