Huck L$.$ B$.$ Finn Incorporated buys plastic resin by the ton and then packages and distributes it in smaller amounts to industrial users. The resin typically costs $$50$ per ton, and Finn has used around $130,000$ tons last year. Finn has a growing business, so usage amount may increase from last year. Placing an order for more resin costs $$500$ in allocated labor cost for purchasing personnel. Holding costs for the resin are estimated at $1$ percent of the product value each month. Finn operates $365$ days a year.

Finn received offers from two different suppliers. Supplier $1$ delivers each order in one shipment. Supplier $2,$ on the other hand is flexible enough to deliver one shipment per day, with each shipment covering two day$$s worth of demand. There is also a capacity limit of Finn$$s warehouse, which can store only $5000$ tons of resin at a time.

You can find the monthly demand data from $2021$ until July of $2023$ on the attached Demand Data file. When you copy paste the data to your own Excel file, use Paste in number format to work with fixed numbers, otherwise data will keep changing as it is randomized.

Use an appropriate forecasting technique to update the demand data until December of $2024.$ Justify accuracy of your forecasting technique. $($You need to try out at least two different forecasting techniques to be able to justify your chosen technique$).$ What would be an appropriate inventory management strategy for Finn Incorporated based on the updated demand for the next year $($in terms of$$ order quantity and Re$-$order Point$)?$ State your assumptions as part of your recommendations to management.

Evaluation criteria $($Max marks $10)$:

$$ Excel skills $(4$ marks$)$: You are expected to use Excel for generating forecasts. This may involve using plotting data, calculations based on various forecasting techniques, using a forecasting measure to justify one forecasting technique over the other. $4$ marks will be provided if a student$/$team submits the Excel file with a complete analysis, and graphs of past and forecasted demand.

$$ Inventory Analysis $(4$ marks$)$ : You are expected to choose one supplier over the other based on EOQ$/$EPQ analysis and also identify re$-$order point level. State your assumptions, if needed.

$$ Recommendation $(2$ marks$)$: Based on your data analysis, comparison of approaches, you may provide your recommendation. Your recommendation should also include exploring more advanced or additional techniques in the future, collecting additional data, additional information, etc.$$

I DONT UNDERSTAND THE EOQ PART, I DID THE FORECASTING ALREADY BUT HOW TO DO THE EOQ PART? $($please explain and if possible include a calculation so I can understand better$)$