Forecasting
Coni Robinson
University of Phoenix
Organization Management
MGT 554
Yolanda Phipps
March 15, 2008
Forecasting
Business forecasting is used by most businesses as a way of predicting the future activities of the business. “Business forecasting can simply be defined as a process of utilizing formulated methods and tools that will enable certain predictions to be made concerning future occurrences within the business cycle, with the primary aim of making decisions and planning courses of action for the future” (Adeyemi, 2006, 1). There are many different ways of forecasting business futures. This paper will describe some examples of forecasting such as; qualitative, time series analysis, and causal. Within each of these forecasting techniques are common models which are different ways of predicting demands of supplies and services within a business.
Qualitative
Qualitative forecasting models are “subjective, judgmental and are based on estimates and opinions” (Chase, Jacobs, & Aquilano, 2005, 514). The first forecasting example will be the grass roots approach meaning the person dealing most closely with the customers is able to forecast the future needs. Using the bottom-up approach information from the customer will be relayed to storage warehouses all the way up to the production lines. (Chase et al., 516) “This traditional approach certainly is a sound basis to develop a forecast, but gives little recognition to important implicit and explicit trends embedded in the historical data” (D'Attilio, 1989, 1).
Market research is used to collect data based on surveys to evaluate existing products. Market research uses many techniques for obtaining information from phone surveys to written surveys. The evalua ...