A multi-national non-alcoholic drink manufacturer is formulating its business strategies for the next few years and is exploring the option of expanding based on the market outlook. It produces bottled water, juices and soft drinks. The company is trying to understand the future demand for these drinks to decide its future actions. The operations manager found the following link, which provides a worldwide market outlook for these drinks by volume in million litres: https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/non-alcoholic-drinks/worldwide#volume The senior management of the MNC is doubtful about the estimates shown in the link and asked the operations manager to carry out forecasting to predict the volume of these three drinks for the year 2022. Examine the following situations: (a) The operations manager plans to use the moving average method as it is simple to compute but is unsure about the number of periods to use. Choose any three number of periods to forecast the volume of these three drinks for the year 2022. Explain the reason(s) for using those periods. Decide the most appropriate number of periods if the moving average method is used for forecasting by computing the differences between the forecasts obtained by the moving average and the estimated sales volumes for the year 2022 shown in the link. Explain your decision. (b) If the operations manager chooses exponential smoothing to forecast the volume of these three drinks for the year 2022, what should be the best value of the smoothing constant to use? You may consider values of smoothing constant as 0.1, 0.2 and 0.3. LOG203 Group-based Assignment SINGAPORE UNIVERSITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES (SUSS) Page 5 of 5 Assume that the historical data shown in the link is the actual sales volume of these drinks by volume. State any other assumptions needed for your computation. Is it possible to determine the forecasts for the drinks for the year 2023 to 2025 using this method? If not, what method can be used to forecast the sales volume for the three drinks from 2023 to 2025? Provide reasons for your answers