Reference no: EM138855

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?

Jan 2004	1200
Feb	1400
Mar	1450
Apr	1580
May	1796
June	2102
July	2152
Aug	2022
Sept	1888
Oct	1938
Nov	1988
Dec	1839
Jan 2005	1684
Feb	1944
Mar	1994
Apr	2154
May	2430
June	2827
July	2877
Aug	2687
Sept	2492
Oct	2542
Nov	2592
Dec	2382

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 five 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).
• Attachment:- File_2.xlsx
• Attachment:- File_3.pdf