Exam 8: Forecasting

A local moving company has collected data on the number of moves they have been asked to perform over the past three years.Moving is highly seasonal,so the owner/operator,who is both burly and highly educated,decides to apply the multiplicative seasonal method (based on a linear regression for total demand)to forecast the number of customers for the coming year.What is his forecast for each quarter?

Graph 8.1 Data plotted in the graph appear in the table below. -Refer to Graph 8.1.What is the average seasonal index for the Sundays in the data set?

Nathan managed to level the customer requests for his valuable services by offering reservations,deploying some promotional pricing,and engaging in yield management,all forms of ________.

Table 8.6 -Use the information in Table 8.6.Use the exponential smoothing method with = 0.5 and a February forecast of 500 to forecast the sales for May.

Explain how the value of alpha affects forecasts produced by exponential smoothing.

Time-series analysis is a statistical approach that relies heavily on historical demand data to project the future size of demand.

Table 8.8 The manager of a pizza shop must forecast weekly demand for special pizzas so that he can order pizza shells weekly.Recent demand has been: -Use the information from Table 8.8.The pizza shop manager believes that a combination forecast might improve her ability to predict future demand,and thus improve keeping fresh ingredients on hand.She decides to use the 3-week simple moving average and exponentially smoothed average forecast (problems # 125 and 127),giving them equal weight.What is her forecast for week #7?

Table 8.8 The manager of a pizza shop must forecast weekly demand for special pizzas so that he can order pizza shells weekly.Recent demand has been: -Use the information from Table 8.8.The pizza shop manager is looking for a forecasting approach that will forecast her demand within 0.5 pizzas.If the actual demand for week #7 was 39 pizzas,which of the combination forecasts came closest to predicting this demand?

Why are forecasts for product families typically more accurate than forecasts for the individual items within a product family?

Table 8.5 -Use the information in Table 8.5.Using the 4-month weighted moving-average technique and the following weights,what is the forecasted demand for November?

Table 8.7 A sales manager wants to forecast monthly sales of the machines the company makes using the following monthly sales data. -Use the information in Table 8.7.Use the 3-month weighted moving-average method to calculate the forecast for month 9.The weights are 0.60,0.30,and 0.10,where 0.60 refers to the most recent demand.

The causal method of forecasting uses historical data on independent variables (such as promotional campaigns and economic conditions)to predict the demand of dependent variables (such as sales volume).

Table 8.2 The Agricultural Extension Agent's Office has tracked fertilizer application and crop yields for a variety of chickpea and has recorded the data shown in the following table.Their staff statistician developed the regression model and computed the performance statistics displayed below the data. -Use the information in Table 8.2.If the correlation coefficient were negative,which of these statements would be TRUE?

The dispersion of forecast errors is measured by both MAD and MSE,which behave differently in the way they emphasize errors.________ gives larger weight to errors and ________ gives smaller weight to errors.

Graph 8.1 Data plotted in the graph appear in the table below. -Refer to Graph 8.1.Use a trend projection to forecast the next week's demand.Then apply seasonal indices to determine the demand on Saturday of the fourth week.What is the demand projected to be?

What is the difference between a reservation and an appointment?

The trend projection with regression model can forecast demand well into the future.

Which one of the following is most useful for measuring the bias in a forecast?

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?