1. The Institute of Supply Management (ISM)
surveys more than 300 purchasing and supply executives in the United States
using a questionnaire seeking information on “changes in production, new
orders, new export orders, imports, employment, inventories, prices,
lead-times, and the timeliness of supplier deliveries in their companies comparing
the current month to the previous month.” The ISM Report on Business
focuses only on the manufacturing sector.
2. The
modern day business environment must deal with a more homogenous consumer base,
which has caused the evolution of a more “push” oriented environment
where suppliers must focus on manufacturing high volumes of standardized goods.
3. The
goal of a good forecasting technique is to minimize the deviation between
actual demand and the forecast.
4. One
of the goals of an effective CPFR system is to minimize the negative impacts of
the bullwhip effect on supply chains.
5. The
goal of a good forecasting technique is to achieve 98.7% accuracy between the
forecast and actual demand.
6. Associative
forecasting methods are based on opinions and intuition.
7. Quantitative
forecasting methods are based on opinions and intuition, whereas qualitative
forecasting methods use mathematical models and relevant historical data to
generate forecasts.
8. In
the Delphi forecasting method, a group of internal and external experts are
surveyed during several rounds in terms of future events and long-term
forecasts of demand but the group members do not physically meet.
9. If
you felt that recent demand trends were more significant, and thus should be
emphasized more in formulating a forecast, then in forecasting demand for the
upcoming demand period, you would probably favor using a simple moving average
over the conventional weighted moving average.
10. If
you were calculating a forecast using an exponential smoothing model, a
calculation usinga = 0.2 would be putting a greater emphasis
on recent data, while a calculation usinga =
0.8 would be putting a greater emphasis on past data. Thus a lowera is more responsive to changes in demand in the most recent periods.
