DM: forecasting

[Miguel Feldens]

Hi!

I am looking for information on forecasting. The particular problem I 
am
starting to study, is a "shoe factory", a domain with lots of factors 
and
trends hard to be detected, which have strong influence on the kind of
shoes that will be produced. The kind of knowledge that would be
interesting to discover in anything that can give good indications 
about
what kinds of shoes will be asked by the market, what the amounts, 
and so
on. The approach adopted by the company right now is to request 
information
from their main buyers, and trying to forecast production from such
information, but that often results on bad predictions.

Has anyone done some work on a similar domain? Where can I find some
references?

Thanks you all in advance!

Miguel Feldens