A convenience store recently started to carry a new brand of soft drink. Management is interested in estimating future sales volume to determine whether it should continue to carry the new brand or replace it with another brand. The table at the top of the next page provides the number of cans sold per week. Use both the trend projection with regression and the exponential smoothing (let α = 0.4 with an initial forecast for week 1 of 617) methods to forecast demand for week 13. Compare these methods by using the mean absolute deviation and mean absolute percent error performance criteria.

Does your analysis suggest that sales are trending and if so, by howmuch?

Week 1 23 45 67 8 9 10 11 12 Sales 617 617 648 739 659 623 742 704 724 715 668 740