You are a manager at a medium sized manufacturing operation that sells a customized product directly to the consumers and the data pattern is linear but it can have the occasion randomness. The causes of this randomness are never apparent until after the event.

As manager, you are to complete a corporate forecast for this expensive and customized product that trends generally with the present economic situation.

Requirement 1

Do the corporate forecast for this product using the data below to complete a 3 and 5 year weighted averages for the next year. For the judgmental forecasting component use the present economic situation.

Question:

What method is best here?  Moving Average or Exponential Smoothing?

What is weighted average?