The Andes Mining Company mines and ships copper ore. The company's sales manager, Juanita Valdes, has been using the moving-average method based on the last three years of sales to forecast the demand for the next year. However, she has become dissatisfied with the inaccurate forecasts being provided by this method. The annual demands (in tons of copper ore) over the past 10 years are 382, 405, 398, 421, 426, 415, 443, 451, 446, 464.

A.) Determine the forecast for next year rounded to the nearest integer.

B.) Determine the moving-average forecasts for the past seven years. Do not round your forecasts. What is MAD?

C.) What is MSE?

D.) Determine what the forecast would have been for next year if the exponential smoothing method had been used instead with a smoothing constant of alpha = 0.5 and initial estimate of 380 for the first forecast.

E.) When using the exponential smoothing forecasting method, what is MAD? Do not round the forecasts while calculating MAD.

F.) When using the exponential smoothing forecasting method, what is MSE?

G.) Determine what the forecast would have been for next year if exponential smoothing with trend had been used instead. Use 10 as the value for the first smoothed trend, and use 370 as the value for the first smoothed forecast. Use smoothing constants alpha = 0.25 and beta = 0.25.