Case 1: Forecasting at DistCo DistCo, a large warehouse service company in the San Francisco Bay Area, stores pharmaceutical products for customers while they are in transit to local retailers. DistCo can store a maximum of 294,000 cases of products at its present facility. Because their business has been growing, the company's management wonders if they should acquire other warehouses in 2016. The materials specialist has accumulated the following historical inventory data in 2011-2015: Inventory (thousand of Year Quarter Period cases) 2011 Q1 1 176 Q2 2 134 Q3 3 186 Q4 4 195 2012 Q1 5 189 Q2 6 157 Q3 7 195 Q4 8 211 2013 Q1 9 205 Q2 10 180 Q3 11 212 Q4 12 229 2014 Q1 13 223 Q2 14 192 Q3 15 234 Q4 16 248 2015 Q1 17 239 Q2 18 217 Q3 19 271 Q4 20 284 Dr. Z. Radovilsky Questions: 1. Identify possible data patterns in the historical data (inventory cases, 2011-2015). Draw the data plot using Excel. That will help you to see the possible data patterns. Does the historical data have a seasonal pattern? Trend pattern? Stationary pattern? Explain. 2. Based on the data patterns, select the following alternative forecasting methods: moving average with n=2 and n=4, linear trend, and linear trend with seasonality. Explain why these methods may be used for forecasting in this case. 3. Utilize Excel to identify the best forecast based on MAD and MAPE. Create a table with forecasting results that may be similar to the table in the \"forecasting_results\" tab in this week's Excel file. Apply the best forecast to estimate inventory in 4 quarters of 2016. 4. Answer the question of the case study: should DistCo acquire more warehouse capacity in 2016 (Hint: will the forecasted number of cases in the 4th quarter of 2016 be close to or greater than 292,000 -- 294,000 cases)? Do all your analysis and answers to the questions in Excel . MGMT 4640 Enterprise Resource 1