Managing the Springville Herald 13.

1 Positives aside, our team has to look at the negatives while making forecasts us ing the past three months of subscription data. Forecasts for the prior year w ere inaccurate because spending used for telemarketing was not always consistent . To make accurate forecasts our team has to take these variables that were no t always consistent into consideration. All factors have to be taken into accou nt before future forecasts can be made. Making future projections using three months of data may not be suffici ent. While running the paper, three months is not a very substantial amount of time in the long run. The Springville Herald should be gathering more data for a longer period of time than three months. There are too many variables that ca n arise in the future months that may not be seen in the prior three months of d ata. It would be our recommendation that the Springville Herald use more than three months worth of data. In order to get a more accurate forecast of the su bscriptions we need to account for the most important variables. In the forecas t it needs to be determined how many hours of telemarketing will be allocated an d stick to it. Since telemarketing has an effect for the sales data, telemarket ing has to be an important variable. While going off prior data has a history o f not working, a mix of actual data and proposed data need to be used since time is valuable. In order for the forecast to be more accurate modified data for more tha n three months needs to be used. We say modified data because the data used nee ds to be changed to be more consistent. Using more consistent hours of telemar keting data will give a better forecast. We have to make sure that the Herald will use telemarketing numbers that do not fall outside of a certain range. By using controlled data accounting the prior year for errors that have been identi fied will provide a better forecast than using the prior three months. 13.3 c. There is a high amount of danger predicting the number of new subscriptions for a month which 2,000 hrs were spent on telemarketing. As you increase the hours spent telemarketing, this does not always equate to an increase in subscriptions . At some point the amount of new customers will plateau. Even if unlimited h ours of telemarketing time are used the Springville Herald will run out of custo mers to sell to. It would not be cost effective to spend over 2,000 hours of telemarketing each w eek, but this would need more research. Looking at the graph, it has a positive slope that will not stay positive forever. As you start moving over 2,000 hrs it is harder to predict new subscriptions. Data is more reliable forecasting un der 2,000 hrs of telemarketing. Forecasting for more that 2,000 hrs becomes le ss accurate and we feel it would not be helpful to use this data.