A convenience store recently started to carry a new brand of soft drink. Management is interested in estimating future sales volume to determine whether it should
continue to carry the new brand or replace it with another brand. The following table provides the number of cans sold per week. Use both the trend projection with
regression and the exponential smoothing (let a=0.4 with an initial forecast for week 1 of 574) methods to forecast demand for week 13. Compare these methods by
using the mean absolute deviation and mean absolute percent error performance criteria. Does your analysis suggest that sales are trending and if so, by how much?
2
5
Period 1
3 4
574 635 652 739 679
Sales
with regression forecast.
(Enter your response rounded to the nearest whole number.)
(1) Obtain the trend projection
The forecast for week 13 is
6
637
7
723
8
691
9
773
10
718
11
656
12
729