Read the following case study:

Paul has just been hired as a management analyst at Digital Cell Phone, Inc. Digital Cell manufactures a broad line of phones for the consumer market. Paul?s boss, the chief operations officer says he has a special assignment for Paul: ?We?ve always just made an educated guess about how many phones we need to make each month. Usually we just look at how many we sold last month and plan to produce about the same number. This sometimes works fine. But most months we either have too many phones in inventory or are out of stock. Neither situation is good. Here are our actual orders entered for the past 36 months. There are 144 phones per case. I was hoping that since you graduated recently from Webster University, you might have studied some techniques that would help us plan better. I?d like you to analyze these data and give me an idea of what our business will look like over the next 6 to 12 month. Do you think you can handle this??

?Of course, ?Paul replies, sounding more confident than he really is. ?How much time do I have??

?I need your report on Monday evening. Please explain things carefully so that I can understand your recommendation without having to ask you any more questions. Since you are new to the company, you should know that I like to see all the details and complete justification for recommendations from my staff.?

With that, Paul was dismissed. Arriving back to him office, he began his analysis.

Prepare Paul?s report to John. Describe the steps you would undertake to perform this analysis. Develop a forecasting model justifying its selection over other techniques, and project the expected number of cases to be ordered in 2014.

Provide a summary of the cell phone industry outlook using Internet resources as part of Paul?s response.

Month Orders received by month Cases 2011 Cases 2012 January 480 February 436 March 482 April 448 May 458 June 489 July 498 August 430 September 444 October 496 November 487 December 525 575 527 540 502 508 573 508 498 485 526 552 587 Cases 2013 608 597 612 603 628 605 627 578 585 581 632 656