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Essay Instructions: Forecasting Assignement:

Prepare a 3 page assignement in which you compare and contrast forecasting methods (e.g., Seasonal, Delphi, technological, time series). Explain how your organization or an organization with which you are familiar uses one or more of these methods to forecast demand under conditions of uncertainty.

Essay Instructions: Forecasting plays a part in every aspect of life. Whether it involves personal, professional, academic or other goals/views/beliefs, it is part of everyday life. In this class you have learned about forecasting in the fashion industry based on trends, innovations in technology that bring on new products to use or account for, color, fashion cycles, culture, seasons, styles, and other areas through research, mathematical models, software analysis and basic observation/awareness. Use this knowledge to write an essay on the following topic.

Topic: Fashion is apart of everyday life. You see it on TV, in magazines, on people around you, and some people start to wonder where the trend they are seeing came from. In the past, and almost certainly in the future, the political/social/economic climate has shaped the fashion industry. What is your view of where the fashion industry is going with the coming inauguration, the current social climate, and the economic environment? Give 2 examples in history to support your analysis and include at least 4 references to your paper. Quotes must be cited in MLA format.

You must use 12pt, Times New Roman font, 1 inch margins all around the paper, and 1.5 inch spacing. NOT DOUBLE SPACING!! I will reformat the paper in MS Word to check for these criteria. The paper must be at least 5 full pages long (not including a title page, bibliography, and work cited page.)

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Essay Instructions: I want to give you a little more information about how we do forecasting and what we would like to know, to help guide you on this paper:

Once a month, the Management Team meets to review our monthly financial report and the quarterly results once every three months. After we look at the financial picture in terms of costs and budgets, we look at sales, mostly in terms of volume. We compare the monthly volumes to our latest forecast that we generated in the previous monthly meeting. Then we try to generate the next month’s sales forecast and update the quarterly forecast and the annual forecast. Of course this gets easier each month as we approach the end of the year. As you know, we have about 1500 individual products in inventory, which we have aggregated into 11 product lines. We are looking at the numbers based on product lines, not individual products. We consider adding new products that our current suppliers are discussing with us and want us to distribute.

In November, when we have two months in the year left, we begin to forecast the annual sales for the next year, again based on product lines. We discuss our strategy for each product line, expanding or contracting each one. We discuss other potential product lines from suppliers we don’t currently carry. We look at new products that are coming on the market from both current suppliers and other suppliers. We generate a trial forecast for next year.

In December we revisit the trial annual forecast that we created in November. We finalize any new information, make final decisions on existing and new products, and finalize the annual forecast. Then we create the quarterly forecasts for each quarter. And finally we create the monthly forecasts for each of the first three months of the year. All this is done using spreadsheet technology.

One area which we want to add to the forecasting process is determining inflation factors on a quarterly basis. Most of our suppliers will pass along inflation of their costs on a quarterly basis. If we could forecast this inflation with some degree of accuracy, we could better utilize our inventory capacity and optimize profits. At the moment, we simply guess at inflation factors. We would like to know if there is a way to forecast these.

Assignment:

The Management Team is all for your efforts to investigate EBBD’s forecasting situation. We want you to thoroughly analyze what we are doing, what other forecasting methods and techniques are available, and make a recommendation on how we should proceed. We are particularly interested in how to improve our short term forecasting on an annual, quarterly, and monthly basis. We also would like to know how we could do longer term forecasting, say over two or three years. And we want to know how we can generate quarterly inflation forecasts.

The report should provide an initial section on the background of the situation, discussion of your analysis of various forecasting methods, and then a recommendation with a justification as to why you are making the recommendation.

NOTE: EBBD is a distibutor, it buys and sells, it does not produce. What is the focus of forecasing for this type of business?

Essay Instructions: Writer Request: infoceo

Forecasting with Indices

Summer data (see Attachment)

A short explanation of what the numbers mean. Should choose a number or two in your index numbers and tell how you would explain its meaning to your coworkers if you were doing this at work.

As for the forecasting portion using the averages of the four years as the forecast, or doing an in-depth analysis of the fluctuations in the data to determine the best guess for year 5's inventory. Explain how arrived at year 5 forecast and list the limitations of your forecast. Should also mention how you might decide whether or not your forecast is accurate. If you feel that the forecast numbers are not accurate, please be sure to state that and explain how you might change your forecast technique to make it better.

Include all necessary tables, explanations of calculations, etc., in Word file.

Excel spreadsheet so I can see how it was calculations. This way, if I have any questions, I can refer to spreadsheet.

Indicated the source of the data
Converted data to an index
Use time series data from the index to forecast inventory needs for the upcoming year
Excel file with formulas for indices as a separate document