Forecasting Sales The Vintage Restaurant is located on Captiva Island, a resort community near Fort Myers,
Forecasting Sales
The Vintage Restaurant is located on Captiva Island, a resort community near Fort Myers, Florida. The restaurant, which is owned and operated by Karen Payne, just completed its third year of operation. During this time, Karen sought to establish a reputation for the restaurant as a high-quality dining establishment that specializes in fresh seafood. The efforts made by Karen and her staff proved successful. Therefore, Karen’s restaurant is currently one of the best and fastest-growing restaurants on the island.
Karen concluded that to plan better for the growth of the restaurant in the future, she needs to be develop a system that will enable her to forecast food and beverage sales by month for up to one year in advance. Karen compiled the following data on total food and beverage sales for the three years of operation.
Food and Beverage Sales for the Vintage Restaurant ($1000s)
Month | First Year | Second Year | Third Year | |||||
January | 242 | 263 | 282 | |||||
February | 235 | 238 | 255 | |||||
March | 232 | 247 | 265 | |||||
April | 178 | 193 | 205 | |||||
May | 184 | 193 | 210 | |||||
June | 140 | 149 | 160 | |||||
July | 145 | 157 | 166 | |||||
August | 152 | 161 | 174 | |||||
September | 110 | 122 | 126 | |||||
October | 130 | 130 | 148 | |||||
November | 152 | 167 | 173 | |||||
December | 206 | 230 | 235 | |||||
Perform an analysis of the sales data for the Vintage Restaurant. Prepare a report for Karen that summarizes your findings, forecasts, and recommendations. Include the following:
- A graph of the time series.
- An analysis of the seasonality of the data. Indicate the seasonal indexes for each month, and comment on the high seasonal and low seasonal sales month. Do the seasonal indexes make intuitive sense? Discuss
- Forecast sales for January through December of the fourth year.
- Assume that January sales for the fourth year turned ou to be $250,000. What was your forecast error? If this error is large, Karen may be puzzled about the difference between your forecast and the actual sales value. What can you do to resolve her uncertainty in the forecasting procedures?
- Recommendations as to when the system that you developed should be updated to account for new sales data that will occur.
- Detailed calculations of your analysis in an appendix to your report.
Deliverable: Word Document