Exam 4: Forecasting

Arnold Tofu owns and operates a chain of 12 vegetable protein "hamburger" restaurants in northern Louisiana. Sales figures and profits for the stores are in the table below. Sales are given in millions of dollars; profits are in hundreds of thousands of dollars. Calculate a regression line for the data. What is your forecast of profit for a store with sales of $24 million? $30 million?

A naïve forecast for September sales of a product would be equal to the forecast for August.

__________ forecasts employ one or more mathematical models that rely on historical data and/or associative variables to forecast demand.

Given an actual demand of 61, a previous forecast of 58, and an alpha of .3, what would the forecast for the next period be using simple exponential smoothing?

What is a tracking signal? Explain the connection between adaptive smoothing and tracking signals.

A naive forecast for September sales of a product would be equal to the sales in August.

What two numbers are contained in the daily report to the CEO of Walt Disney Parks & Resorts regarding the six Orlando parks?

Forecasts used for new product planning, capital expenditures, facility location or expansion, and R&D typically utilize a

An approach to exponential smoothing in which the smoothing constant is automatically changed to keep errors to a minimum is called __________.

Patterns in the data that occur every several years are called circuits.

For a given product demand, the time series trend equation is 53 - 4 X. The negative sign on the slope of the equation

Use exponential smoothing with trend adjustment to forecast deliveries for period 10. Let alpha = 0.4, beta = 0.2, and let the initial trend value be 4 and the initial forecast be 200.

Linear-regression analysis is a straight-line mathematical model to describe the functional relationships between independent and dependent variables.

A seasonal index for a monthly series is about to be calculated on the basis of three years' accumulation of data. The three previous July values were 110, 135, and 130. The average over all months is 160. The approximate seasonal index for July is:

The tracking signal is the

Linear regression is known as a(n) __________ because it incorporates variables or factors that might influence the quantity being forecast.

__________ forecasts address the business cycle by predicting inflation rates, money supplies, housing starts, and other planning indicators.

Demand for a certain product is forecast to be 8,000 units per month, averaged over all 12 months of the year. The product follows a seasonal pattern, for which the January monthly index is 1.25. What is the seasonally-adjusted sales forecast for January?

Forecasts of individual products tend to be more accurate than forecasts of product families.

Which of the following techniques uses variables such as price and promotional expenditures, which are related to product demand, to predict demand?