Smith's IceCream Parlor . Krystyna Smith is the operations manager for smith's IceCream Parlor, an ice cream manufacturing and retailing company. The company produces over 20 flavors of ice cream. Krystyna does not have a good understanding of how the company forecasts demand for ice cream because it is coded into the company’s ERP system, and there is no documentation detailing how forecasts are calculated. In order to assess how well the system is forecasting, she has selected one representative flavor. She has asked you to recommend a forecasting method. Utilize the data in the table to address the following issues:

1. Recommend a yearly forecasting method for this flavor based on a review of the data. In doing so, you would need to compare three forecasting methods (trend projection among them) and, then, recommend the most accurate one.

2. Forecast demand for the next two years

3. Forecast demand for Jan, July and August in the following year

4. Evaluate the performance of the three forecasting methods using common measures of forecast error (e.g., MAD)

5. Please provide numerical support for your recommendation

Month Year 1 Year 2 Year 3

Jan 5000 5200 5300

Feb 5500 5400 6200

Mar 5300 5500 5800

Apr 7500 7700 8300

May 8000 8600 9000

Jun 8700 8900 9500

Jul 9300 10000 9800

Aug 10400 10700 11400

Sep 8300 8700 8500

Oct 7400 7900 8000

Nov 4500 4700 4800

Dec 4100 4300 4600