Exam 14: Forecasting

Focus forecasting selects the best forecast from a group of forecasts generated by individual techniques.

Table 14.2 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 14.2.In order to realize the sale of 700 books,how many sales calls will the sales representative have to make?

It is now near the end of May and you must prepare a forecast for June for a certain product.The forecast for May was 900 units.The actual demand for May was 1000 units.You are using the exponential smoothing method with = 0.20.The forecast for June is:

Table 14.8 -Use the information in Table 14.8.Using the exponential smoothing method,with alpha equal to 0.2,what is the forecasted demand for November? Use an initial value for the forecast equal to 277 units.

Table 14.7 -Use the information in Table 14.7.What is the forecast for July with the two-month moving-average method and June sales of 40 units?

A naive forecast is a time-series method whereby the forecast for the next period equals the demand for the current period.

Table 14.12 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 14.12,what is the CFE for months 6-10 for the exponential smoothing technique?

Which forecasting technique would you consider for technological forecasts?

Table 14.9 -Use the information in Table 14.9.Use an exponential smoothing model with a smoothing parameter of 0.30 and an April forecast of 525 to determine what the forecast sales would have been for June.

Three weeks of data are available from a restaurant.Develop a forecast and explain why your approach is reasonable.

Variations in demand that cannot be predicted are said to be a(n)________ pattern.

When forecasting total demand for all their services or products,few companies err by more than:

Table 14.10 TOMBOW is a small manufacturer of pencils and has had the following sales record for the most recent five months: Use an exponential smoothing model to forecast sales in months 2,3,4,and 5.Let the smoothing parameter equal 0.6;select F1 = 150 to get the forecast started. -Use the information in Table 14.10.The forecast for month 3 is:

Bias is the worst kind of forecasting error.

The marketing department for a major manufacturer tracks sales and advertising expenditures each month.Data from the past nine months and regression output appear in the following table.Interpret the equation coefficients and the values for the coefficient of determination and the correlation coefficient. Created by POM-QM for Windows

Table 14.12 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 14.12,what is the MSE for months 6-10 for the exponential smoothing technique?

Market research is a systematic approach to determine consumer interest by gaining consensus from a group of experts while maintaining their anonymity.

One aspect of demand that makes every forecast inaccurate is:

Table 14.10 TOMBOW is a small manufacturer of pencils and has had the following sales record for the most recent five months: Use an exponential smoothing model to forecast sales in months 2,3,4,and 5.Let the smoothing parameter equal 0.6;select F1 = 150 to get the forecast started. -Use the information in Table 14.10.The forecast for month 5 is:

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