Exam 8: Forecasting

Two mercenary forecasters dueled for the lucrative Surreal Farms egg production forecasting job.The farmer provided them with output levels from ten day's production and had them forecast the next ten days.The combatant's forecasts and the actual egg production are shown in the table.Which forecaster was more accurate and should be hired as a result of his performance on this trial?

Table 8.6 -Use the information in Table 8.6.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.

The local building supply store experienced what they considered to be irregular demands for lumber after the devastating hurricane season.These unusual data points were considered:

________ methods use historical data on independent variables to predict demand.

Aggregation is the act of clustering several similar products or services.

Barney took what he liked to call "the shotgun approach" to forecasting.Every period he tried a number of different forecasting approaches and at the end of the period he reviewed all of the forecasts to see which was the most accurate.The winner would be used for next period's forecast (but he still made forecasts all possible ways so he could use the system again for the following period).The more formal name for this technique is:

In the winter,Handyman Negri repaired snowblowers and in the summer he earned extra money by repairing lawnmowers,a classic example of:

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.If the forecast for period 7 is $4,300,what is the forecast for period 9 using exponential smoothing with an alpha equal to 0.30?

________ 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.

"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:

The judgment methods of forecasting are to be used for purposes of:

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 CFE for months 6-10 for the exponential smoothing technique?

Which one of the following statements about forecasting is FALSE?

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 provided in Table 8.2.What percent in the variation of the variable Bushels is explained by the value of the variable Fertilizer?

Combination forecasting is most effective when the techniques being combined contribute different kinds of information to the forecasting process.

A weary traveler shows up at a hotel desk at midnight without a reservation.The desk clerk informs him that there is a room available,but sadly it is marked up 80% higher than the usual price.This is an example of promotional pricing.

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

The electricity bill at Padco was driven solely by the lights throughout the office;everything else was driven by alternative energy sources.The office was open roughly 8 hours a day,five days a week and the cleaning crew spent about the same amount of time in the offices each week night.The kilowatt hour usage for the office was best described as a:

Your team has been asked to develop a forecast for the need for storage in the company's communication devices ten years from now.What method would develop the best forecast? Why? How would you execute this method?

Which one of the following statements about forecasting is FALSE?