1. Imagine that you have a friend who owns and runs a family restaurant that specializes in plant-based whole foods. At capacity, the restaurant requires four wait staff to wait on all the tables. While the restaurant has been getting busier and busier, your friend has found it challenging to have the right number of wait staff working.

Sometimes when only one person is working, he or she is overwhelmed, and other times the three or four people working stare into a mostly empty restaurant. When staff aren't working, the restaurant is losing money, and the wait staff aren't earning tips. Without a full income from waiting tables, the better wait staff move to busier jobs, so the quality of workers is suffering from this poor scheduling. Using what NEL you know about forecasting demand, what advice would you offer to solve this scheduling issue?