The materials manager at Metropolitan Hospitals must plan for inventories at three hospital locations within the region. His plan is to allocate stock to these locations. It is necessary to predict sales in order to have a basis for stock allocation. The manager wonders whether it would be more accurate to generate a forecast for each hospital or to generate one forecast from the aggregated data and apportion it to each region. (The more accurate the forecast for each region, the lower will be the inventories.)
To test the idea, the manager assembled the following monthly usage data for a particular syringe over the last year:

If the manager were to use simple (level only) exponential smoothing with a = 0.2, which approach should he use? Why?

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