Speaker 1: Alright, thanks for joining us for today's video. Today we'll be talking about different forecasting methods and in a couple of other videos that we have we'll dive a little bit deeper into those forecasting methods and talk about specifically how to create those models and then how to determine which model is right for you or if you need a more robust model. So as we begin looking at forecasting methods one of the first things that most people think of is they think about the quantitative type of forecast. They think about taking historical data or time series or correlation data and kind of creating these forecasts out in the future of what we think is going to happen. But there are actually quite a few instances where we see a lot of quantitative or sorry qualitative forecasting approaches and these would be opinions from experts, decision makers, or customers about what we should expect to see in a specific situation. And so we'll dive a little bit deeper here in this video into the different types of quantitative as well as qualitative forecasting and then in future videos we'll go in and we'll actually talk about how to go through each of these different approaches. And so as we look at quantitative forecasting methods we can really break that out into these four approaches or these four approaches are what we commonly see. There are groups that use the naive approach which is really just looking at what happened in the previous period and saying that's going to happen again. Right? I sold you know 100 widgets. Last period, this period, I'm going to sell 100 widgets again. Moving averages might say okay the last three periods if I take the average of what happened the last three periods the next period will probably be you know the the same as those and then we kind of move that average along whether it's three periods, six periods, twelve periods, something like that. Exponential smoothing basically goes and it is it's really a matter of taking a weighted average approach when we're looking at these moving averages. So we're going to weight different periods differently because maybe they're more relevant to the forecast and so it's a little bit more robust and and and a little more sophisticated when we're talking about forecasting methods. And then of course there's trend projection where we look at what is the trajectory of what's happening. You know maybe we're increasing every single period or we've had like two increases, a small decrease, and then another increase and so we see you know we're starting to see this rise or this increasing trend and so we need to take a look at that. And so we'll look at those and then we'll also throw in a bonus a bonus video where we'll talk a little bit about linear regression and then how to think about that and and perhaps even dive in deep a little bit on on some of those things. The qualitative forecasting methods there are four of those that we'll cover as well. There's executive opinion which is typically when we're looking at a group of executives that they're going to make a decision or an opinion about what's going to happen in the next period. You've got the Delphi model method which is where you've got consumers that or or maybe they're they're just trusted advisors or something like that but they give their opinion about what they think is going to happen, how many widgets they'd buy or or how many widgets they think would be sold in different markets or wherever else. And then you've got you've got a group that compiles all that information and sort of interprets it but then they give it to decision makers and those decision makers then go through. So we've got three different groups of people working on things in that Delphi method there. The decision makers, those who compile all the information and then of course the the people that are surveyed or asked about their opinions on it. And then there's the sales force estimates and we typically see this quite a bit where you've got individual sales people that they make their own sales forecasting estimates and then from those numbers then that's that's where we get those those estimates of what's going to happen in the next period. And and then the final area is consumer surveys you know would you purchase this or how would you purchase this. Again in each of the videos we'll go through we'll talk about a little bit of the problems with with just looking at one of these individual methods or one of these individual approaches but then we'll also tell you a little bit more about how to go about forecasting in that method or using that approach. And so as we look at the entire landscape especially of the the videos that we've got here that that we're going to go through we're going to be addressing of course the quantitative and the qualitative approaches to forecasting in each of these videos. Subscribe to the channel and and tune in again for for more information on forecasting.