Managing the Springfield Herald - p. 519
SH 13.1 - What criticisms can you make concerning the method of forecasting that involved taking the new subscriptions data for the prior three months as the basis for future projections?
- 3 months is a valid for comparing quarterly growth retroactively, but more time is needed for a valid future forecast.
- Are there seasonal quarters historically where sales are higher?
Also, the factors that have affected the sales in the past three months must also remain constant for the entire year or at least the average sale/hour should be consistent. Here the average sale/ hour for the prev months were as follows:
Month 1= 4 ; Month 2 = 3.89 ; Month 3 = 5.1 . Again, the total average of the three months is: 4.32 which has an error variation of -0.8 to 0.4. This range is comparatively very high, as, for a three month data we would expect the error to be close to zero.
SH 13.2 - What factors other than the number of telemarketing hours spent might be useful in predicting the number of new subscriptions? Explain
- How many trial subscriptions are currently in circulation/ what is a normal rate of trial subscriptions converted into regular descriptions.
- What is the percentage of the population within distribution that does not already take the Herald (i.e. potential target customers)
Types of subscription: Annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly
Number of calls made
Turnover rate of the regular subscriptions
Post subscription services
Feedback
Number of premium members
Special offers
SH 13.3 (A) - Analyze the data and develop a regression model to predict the number of new subscriptions for a month, based on the number of hours spent on telemarketing for new subscriptions.
We can start by making the following analysis:
Take the data as it is given
Rearrange the data according to the number of hours and then predicting it
Group them according to quarterly hours and then