Limitations and outlook
Further research is required to analyze the use cases of BDA in relation to forecast situations to evaluate whether the matching is accurate. Such research would help to estimate the usefulness of diverse applications and support businesses in setting priorities. Moreover, an analysis of the costs of different BDA techniques would support businesses’ investment decisions. There are, of course, several limitations of this study. First, in addition to scientific articles, the literature review includes numerous non-academic sources from the information technology industry. However, they are essential to understand the techniques and technologies. To avoid bias, the sources were integrated with additional caution. Second, when analyzing the techniques’ potential concerning forecast demand in retail supply chains, the authors limited the spectrum of demand forecast to primary demand, excluding secondary and tertiary demand, because the former often lets businesses directly determine the latter two. Third, the list of applications is not exhaustive; only applications that seemed meaningful or were encountered during the literature search were included. Fourth, the two analyses lack empirical proof because of the third limitation. Fifth, the usefulness of each application is assumed to be equal, but this does not reflect their actual usefulness.
