Reference no: EM13332268

Marcello & Sophia Bella Gelato manufactures gourmet ice cream, sorbet, and other frozen desserts and  sells its products at its own stores. People drive long distances to buy its ice cream and other assorted  deserts. A new manager at one of the stores wants to develop a forecasting model so that she can plan to  order adequate amounts of ice cream from the manufacturing center and determine the number of  employees that would be needed. The ice cream sales record for the past 12 quarters is provided in a table below. To assist her with her plans, develop demand forecasts using the models specified below:

a) a naïve model
b) a moving average model (n = 4)
c) a weighted moving average model (wt-1 = 0.25; wt-2 = 0.35; wt-3 = 0.25; wt-4 = 0.15)
d)  an exponential smoothing model (??= 0.50; F1 = A1)
e)  a simple linear trend model (not seasonally adjusted); and
f) determine the seasonal indices and seasonal factors for each quarter
g)  use the solution in part (f) to determine a seasonally adjusted forecast.
For each of the models above, provide the following measures of forecast accuracy: Bias, MAD,
MAPE. Also, plot both the data and your forecasted values. After, developing all the above
forecasts, which model do you recommend to her for this data set?


Quarter Ice Cream Sales (000)
(gal)
1 385
2 560
3 825
4 460
5 410
6 530
7 945
8 550
9 495
10 605
11 905
12 630