Order the impact on forecasting questions

.Order the impact on forecasting questions
What factors enter into the choice of a value for the smoothing constant in exponential smoothing?
11. How accurate is your local five-day weather forecast? Support your answer with actual data.
12. Explain how using a centered moving average with a length equal to the length of a season eliminates seasonality from a time series.
13. Contrast the terms sales and demand.
14. Contrast the reactive and proactive approaches to forecasting. Give several examples of types of
organizations or situations in which each type is used.
15. Explain how flexibility in production systems relates to the forecast horizon and forecast accuracy.
16. How is forecasting in the context of a supply chain different from forecasting for just a single
organization? List possible supply chain benefits and discuss potential difficulties in doing supply
chain forecasting.
17. Which type of forecasting approach, qualitative or quantitative, is better?
18. Suppose a software producer is about to release a new version of its popular software. What information do you think it would take into account in forecasting initial sales?
19. Choose the type of forecasting technique (survey, Delphi, averaging, seasonal, naive, trend, or
associative) that would be most appropriate for predicting the:
a. Demand for Mother’s Day greeting cards.
b. Popularity of a new television series.
c. Demand for vacations on the moon.
d. Impact a price increase of 10 percent would have on sales of orange marmalade.
e. Demand for toothpaste in a particular supermarket.
TAKING STOCK
1. Explain the trade-off between responsiveness and stability in a forecasting system that uses timeseries data.
2. Who needs to be involved in preparing forecasts?
3. How has technology had an impact on forecasting?
CRITICAL THINKING
EXERCISES
1. It has been said that forecasting using exponential smoothing is like driving a car by looking in the
rear-view mirror. What are the conditions that would have to exist for driving a car that are analogous to the assumptions made when using exponential smoothing?
2. What capability would an organization have to have to not need forecasts?
3. When a new business is started, or a patent idea needs funding, venture capitalists or investment
bankers will want to see a business plan that includes forecast information related to a profit and
loss statement. What type of forecasting information do you suppose would be required?
4. Discuss how you would manage a poor forecast.
5. Omar has heard from some of his customers that they will probably cut back on order sizes in the
next quarter. The company he works for has been reducing its salesforce due to falling demand, and
he worries that he could be next if his sales begin to fall off. Believing that he may be able to convince his customers not to cut back on orders, he turns in an optimistic forecast of his next quarter
sales to his manager. What are the pros and cons of doing that?
6. Give three examples of unethical conduct involving forecasting and the ethical principle each
violates.
PROBLEMS
1. A commercial bakery has recorded sales (in dozens) for three products, shown as follows:
Day
Blueberry
Muffins
Cinnamon
Buns Cupcakes
1 30 18 45
2 34 17 26
3 32 19 27
4 34 19 23
5 35 22 2