Exam 8: Forecasting

Table 8.3 A textbook publisher for books used in business schools believes that the number of books sold is related to the number of campus visits to decision makers made by their sales force. A sampling of the number of sales calls made and the number of books sold is shown in the following table. -Use the information provided in Table 8.3. If a sales representative makes 55 sales calls, the number of book sales the publisher should expect is:

"Well if you're out of Duff I'll just take my business elsewhere!" the customer shouted as he stomped out of the Quickie Mart. This unfortunate incident could be described as:

Consider the following data concerning the performance of a forecasting method.

Table 8.4 The Furniture Super Mart is a furniture retailer in Evansville, Indiana. The Marketing Manager wants to prepare a media budget based on the next quarter's business plan. The manager wants to decide the mix of radio advertising and newspaper advertising needed to generate varying levels of Weekly Gross Revenue. The manager has collected data for the past five weeks, and has recorded the following average Weekly Gross Revenues and expenditures for Weekly Radio (X1) and Newspaper (X2) advertising: The Manager uses the multiple regression model in OM Explorer and obtains the following results: -Use the information provided in Table 8.4. What amount of Weekly Gross Revenue can be expected for a week in which no radio or newspaper advertising is purchased? (Assume all other variables are held constant.)

Which one of the following statements about forecasting is True?

Technological forecasting is an application of executive opinion to keep abreast of the latest advances in technology.

Andy took what he liked to call "the sheriff without a gun" approach to forecasting. Every period he tried a number of different forecasting approaches and simply averaged the predictions for all of the techniques. This overall average was the official forecast for the period. The more formal name for this technique is:

Bias error causes the greatest disruption to planning efforts.

________ is a time-series method used to estimate the average of a demand time series by averaging the demand for the n most recent time periods.

Table 8.1 The management of an insurance company monitors the number of mistakes made by telephone service representatives for a company they have subcontracted with. The number of mistakes for the past several months appears in this table along with forecasts for errors made with three different forecasting techniques. The column labeled Exponential was created using exponential smoothing with an alpha of 0.30. The column labeled MA is forecast using a moving average of three periods. The column labeled WMA uses a 3-month weighted moving average with weights of 0.65, 0.25, and 0.10 for the most-to-least recent months. -Using Table 8.1, what is the mean absolute percent error for months 6-10 using the exponential smoothing forecasts?