Managerial Decision Making
Write a brief report discussing your answers to the tasks below using the GM circulation data and submit your quantitative analysis on a supporting spreadsheet. The aim of this assignment is to model and analyse the data appropriately and interpret your output to provide recommendations to the owner of Garrett Magazines on how to manage the business going forward.
For the Tom’s Treats magazine data:
Task 1: Carry out appropriate diagnostic analysis to confirm whether you agree with Jake Fearne’s conclusion that the data for Tom’s Treats is stationary. Make sure you provide a body of evidence to back up your reasoning.
Task 2: In your spreadsheet, apply the following FOUR updating schemes: Naïve Forecasting, Updating the Mean, Moving Average of Length k and either Weighted Moving Average of length k OR Simple Exponential Smoothing.
In your report, provide a summary table to present the forecast for the next time period under each of the schemes and write a short statement to justify the values you introduce, ie: k, weights, alpha, method of optimisation.
Task 3: Evaluate each updating scheme you have used in task 2 using statistical and graphical analysis. Recommend which one updating scheme should be used to forecast the next time period value. In your discussion explain why you have selected your chosen scheme over the other methods and discuss how suitable you think your model is.
For the Cass’s Cakes magazine data:
Task 4: Carry out diagnostic analysis and build an appropriate model to forecast the circulation data for Cass’s Cakes. Make sure you are clear about which time series components you believe this data exhibits and back up your reasoning with graphical and statistical analysis. Present your forecast for the next time period.
Task 5: Evaluate your model in task 4 using statistical and graphical analysis and discuss any factors that the manager should consider when forecasting data that is exhibiting this/these time series components.
For all magazine data:
Task 6: Given your analysis of Garrett Magazine’s circulation data what factors, issues or developments should Jake Fearne consider for the future?
MARKING CRITERIA
The marking criteria guidelines are published in advance so you know how you will be judged for this piece of work and are available on Studyspace.
