EDI methodology is very important to understand. There are a lot of differences between consumer and industrial marketing firms, and a formal mail survey was sent out to 478 marketing executives. The survey questionnaire was composed of several different measures, and these included commonality, pleasure, utilization, and applicability of marketing techniques. Forecasting was specifically looked into. They also looked into what kind of accuracy was achieved, and they looked into the usage of information technologies. A lot of different measures were taken and looked at. The couple of measures that were looked into included all the different types of information technology too, and these included EDI, DRP, MIS, and others. Before the survey was sent out, there was a pretest that the authors went to so that they could send it out to forecasting managers and be more successful. They wanted to make sure that the look and understandability of the questionnaire and cover letter was comprehensible. After both surveys were sent out, almost 200 questionnaires were returned, and they got about a 40% response rate. The response rate was seen as useful because it was more than the response rate of a lot of other prior forecasting surveys. Of all the almost 200 respondents, there were about 100 respondents that said their company was a consumer firm, about 60 said their company was an industrial firm, about 25 said their company was both, and about 5 people did not answer the question at all. The 30 remaining firms that could not be understood as either consumer or industrial were completely deleted from the survey. These results suggest a lot of important information about the differences between consumer and industrial firms. There are a whole lot of firms out there, and there are many that are just not responding to the forecasting surveys that were being sent out. There are a ton of different ways that companies can perceive themselves, and there are a lot of firms that really dont go through the trouble of answering the questions whatsoever. Its important that firms recognize it is necessary to answer all the questions thoroughly on forecasting surveys. If they can discover important information from the forecasting surveys, then industry executives are in a better position to evaluate all things regarding the whole industry. It actually helps people a lot to recognize that the whole industry is interrelated, and you have to answer questions in order to keep the industry going at large.