BUS606: Operations and Supply Chain Management

According to Adedayo et al, and Cassia, et al, qualitative forecasting method which is subjective in nature involves the use of soft data like the decision maker's experiences, personal values, intuition, emotions and judgmental in reaching a forecast. Some of the common types of qualitative forecasting methods are; (1) Delphi Method, Sales Force Composite, (iii) Consumer Survey, (iv) Jury of Executive Opinions. Quantitative techniques use specified and systematic procedures in analyzing past or historical data by studying the pattern and projecting the pattern into the future using several methods to make a forecast. Generally, this method is assumed to be objectives because it's scientific in nature. Quantitative techniques fall into two categories; (i) trend projections using time series model and (ii) casual method. Trend projection which is the focus of this study which is further divided into smoothing methods (moving average forecast and exponential smoothing) and time series decomposition. The commonly use quantitative forecasting techniques in the developing economy like Nigeria that has limited access to sophisticated quantitative forecasting methods and facilities are relatively simple methods. Some of the relatively simple forecasting methods include among others; naïve method, moving averages method, weighted moving average method, exponential smoothing method and regression analysis.