Dave is a manager of a local AT&T Wireless retail store. He would like to forecast the number of customers walking into his retail store per day to improve his staffing decisions. The following data show the number of customers who entered Dave’s store during the last eight days. These data can also be found in the Excel file daily customers.xlsx.

Day 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Customers 260 243 232 277 270 285 248 254

a. Forecast the number of customers who will visit Dave’s store on Day 9 using a three-period simple moving average.

b. Calculate the MAD for the forecast in part a.

c. Forecast the number of customers who will visit Dave’s store on Day 9 using exponential smoothing with a = 0.1.

d. Calculate the MAD for the forecast in part c.

e. In which forecast do you have the most confidence?

AppendixLO1