Building a Computerized System to Measure the Forecasting Methods and Evaluate the Efficiency for an Industrial Product

摘要

A forecasting is defined as an attempt to estimate the market need of a particular product or service or a combination of goods over a future period of time. The demand forecasting process is one of the important activities that precede the planning process for capacity and production. The importance of this activity requires determining what to forecast how it is being forecast and the time period covered by the forecast. The desired accuracy in forecasting results depends primarily on the value of the physical product because forecasting error slightly burdens production system. The objective of this study is to build a computerized system using visual basic with access database and integrate the system with Excel program to analyze the data and represent it graphically to calculate the different forecasting methods to forecast the demand of a particular product for a future period of time and evaluate the efficiency the solution using the evaluation criteria which are: Mean Squared Error (MSE), Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD), Mean Absolute Percent Error (MAPE), Largest Absolute Deviation (LAD). This study will use data collected from one of the main companies in Iraq. The data include the order unit of the product. Data analysis will be held using three individual forecasting methods. Due to the limitation of the time, the study will focus on one of the series of the product of the company only.