Forecasting: Practice Conceptual Questions 1. How is demand forecasting related to capacity planning? 2. Describe the activities performed in the forecasting cycle for: a) planning b) executing c) reviewing 3. How would accurate and timely demand forecasts provide an operation with a competitive advantage? 4. Why are forecasting errors inevitable? 5. Why is big data an important aspect of demand forecasting? 6. Describe how the following data series would look as time-ordered plots: a) stationary b) trend c) seasonality d) trend and seasonality 7. Give examples of daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly seasonality. 8. Interpret the following seasonal relatives: a) 1.5 b) 1.0 c) 0.5 d) 0.0 9. What are the advantages and disadvantages of nave smoothing? 10. Why is exponential smoothing a special case of a weighted moving average? 11. Explain under what conditions naive forecasting is equivalent to a moving average and to exponential smoothing. 12. In regard to demand forecasting, why is predictive modeling typically more difficult than methods like moving averages and exponential smoothing? 13. Why is demand forecasting especially difficult for new products