The actual demand for the patients at Omaha Emergency Medical Clinic for the first 6 weeks of this year follows:

Clinic administrator Marc Schniederjans wants you to forecast patient demand at the clinic for week 7 by using this data. You decide to use a weighted moving average method to find this forecast. Your method uses four actual demand levels, with weights of 0.333 on the present period, 0.25 one period ago, 0.25 two periods ago, and 0.167 three periods ago.

a) What is the value of your forecast?

b) If instead the weights were 20, 15, 15, and 10, respectively, how would the forecast change? Explain why.

c) What if the weights were 0.40, 0.30, 0.20, and 0.10, respectively? Now what is the forecast for week 7?

Refer to Solved Problem 4.1.

a) Use a 3-year moving average to forecast the sales of Volkswagen Beetles in Nevada through year 6.

b) What is the MAD?

c) What is the MSE?

Problem 4.1

The following gives the number of pints of type B blood used at Woodlawn Hospital in the past 6 weeks:

a) Forecast the demand for the week of October 12 using a 3-week moving average.

b) Use a 3-week weighted moving average, with weights of .1, .3, and .6, using .6 for the most recent week. Forecast demand for the week of October 12.

c) Compute the forecast for the week of October 12 using exponential smoothing with a forecast for August 31 of 360 and a = .2.