Cooper Toys sells a portable baby stroller called the Tot n' Trot. The past two years of demand for Tot n'Trots are shown in the table below. Use an appropriate method to forecast the 6 months from January through June 2006. Please defend your use of forecasting method (i.e. why you selected your particular method). If you are using smoothing constants, you must also defend (mathematically please) why you selected the values that you did. How good is your forecast?
Using the forecasting paper supplied, Forecasting demand for single-period
products: A case study in the apparel industry, Mostard, Teunter, de Koster,
European Journal of operational Research, Vol 211, and the demand information given in the Excel spreadsheet "demand data for forecasting": determine the forecast for each SKU using Method 1, 2 and 3.
Then, assume the season is over, and your actual demand is given in the sheet "realized demand". Determine:
the accuracy of your forecast (quantitatively and qualitatively).
Now read Section 3.2.1 of the paper. Assume you have ve experts and their forecasts are given in the "experts" sheet. Using the method given:
determine your forecast for each SKU and the accuracy of these experts (quantitatively and qualitatively).