Posted: April 24th, 2025

Week 4

 Forecast Performance

Course Objectives: 

CO5: Investigate forecast performance utilizing spreadsheet techniques.

Prompt:

This week you will use an excel spreadsheet to analyze forecasting performance. Your company produces and distributes two lines of Consumer External Hard Drives: 1 Terabyte drives (1 Tb) and 5 Terabyte Drives (5 Tb). The unit sales levels and forecasts for the last two previous years are in the table below. For this exercise, You have been asked to calculate the Forecast error, Forecast Percentage, Mean percentage Error (MPE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) for (a) each type of terabyte (b) each year, and (c) for each two-year period. The concepts, equations, and examples for how to calculate these forecasting effectiveness are covered in your textbook on pg 107 – 114. Finally, for each set of problems you will provide insight into the sales trends, and forecasting effectiveness with a written summary of your findings.

Assignment Instructions:

• Utilize the Excel template attached below for this assignment. Label your submission document as follows: yourlastname_Assignment4.xlsx (ex: JJohnson_Assignment4.xlsx)
• Carefully read the problem statement in order to understand what you are asked to analyze. 
• Plagiarism in any form will result in an automatic zero for this assignment:

  Using another author’s exact words without quotations AND without an in-text citation
  Paraphrasing by changing a couple of another author’s words and claiming them to be your own.
  Turning in another student’s work

• There are no late assignments accepted after the last day of the course unless: (a) prior approval has been obtained from the professor or (b) you have an approved 30 day extension