Kent Business School

BUSN-9960: Logistics and Supply Chain Planning

Assessment 3: Individual Report & Technical Questions (60% of your module mark)

To be uploaded by the date specified on Moodle

Coursework Surgery (to answer your questions): Wed 4th Jan 2023, 3—4 PM, Sibson Caffe

Suppose that you are a retailer, and you would like to design your own Supply Chain to launch
a new products in a competitive environment. You will procure such a product from a wholesaler
who will deliver the product to you, as needed, on the basis of a pricing scheme agreement.
Most of your decisions will be based on the amounts of product you will sell. Since you
are trading a new product, you do not have any previous data-series of its demand.
However, you can use the sales of a similar product that are available for the last four
years in order to predict your sales for the first 6 months of operation in 2023. The
available data is summarized in the following Table:

Year 2019 Year 2020 Year 2022 Year 2022

Month Sales Month Sales Month Sales Month Sales
Jan 236 Jan 257 Jan 264 Jan 277
Feb 274 Feb 296 Feb 321 Feb 334
March 303 March 311 March 330 March 374
April 305 April 286 April 327 April 360
May 288 May 285 May 317 May 348
June 281 June 268 June 302 June 337
July 256 July 256 July 305 July ---
Aug 270 Aug 293 Aug 317 Aug ---
Sept 256 Sept 265 Sept 307 Sept ---
Oct 299 Oct 325 Oct 366 Oct ---
Nov 224 Nov 208 Nov 243 Nov ---
Dec 196 Dec 199 Dec 218 Dec ---

Note 1: Please personalize your data (so they become unique and different from any other
student) by completing the missing values with random numbers of your own choice.

Note 2: Please specific very clearly your seasonal periodicity M (if any) as well as your
general trend and cyclic effect behavior (constant, linear or quadratic, etc.) and show
their graphs both in the PDF and Excel files.

Use the above data and employ the decomposition method in order to forecast the amounts of
your product to be sold during the first 6 months of operation in 2023.

Your Report needs to be written in a concise, but rigorous, manner and should be between
1500 and 2500 words long excluding tables and figures. It should be comprehensive and self-
explanatory (including all the method’s steps and the related graphs). You will be asked to submit
through Moodle both your PDF Report (explaining all the steps of the method) and you Excel file
(that should include all your calculations and graphs as well).