Question 1

a)Elite Furnishings of Jamaica owns and operatestwelve Furniture Distribution Centers across The Caribbean Islands. His signature item is a Mahogany textured kitchen counter accompanied by a Granite counter top. Sales (X, in millions of dollars) is related to Profits (Y, in hundreds of thousands of dollars) by the regression equation

Y = 4.21 + 0.5 X.

Determine the forecast of profit for a store with sales of $20 million and $30 million respectively.

b)The Forecasting unit at a local department store has tracked the sales of a product over the last ten weeks and has obtained data as shown in table 1.

iForecast demand using exponential smoothing with an alpha of 0.4, and an initial forecast of 28.0 for period 1.

iiCalculate the MAD.

iiiIf the manager at Elite believes that an Alpha value of 0.3 would be more appropriate. What recommendations would you give the manager?

Table 1

Period. demand

1 24

2 23

3 26

4 36

5 26

6 30

7 32

8 26

9 25

10 28

QUESTION 2

Discuss the differences of push and pull supply chain processes.