Briefly describe the methods of forecasting future demand on the basis of past sales.
Answer: The methods are: 1) Timeseries analysis, that breaks past time series into four components (trend, cycle, seasonal, and erratic) and projects them into the future. 2) Exponential smoothing, that projects the next period's sales by combining an average of past sales and the most recent sales, giving more weight to the latter. 3) Statistical demand analysis, which measures the impact of a set of causal factors (such as income, marketing expenditures, and price) on the sales level. 4) Econometric analysis, builds sets of equations that describe a system and statistically derives the different parameters that make up the equations statistically.