THE ROLE OF FORECASTING ON EVENTS PLANNING AND STAFF SCHEDULING

Abstract

Forecasting is an important element for an organization in any field. Usually, forecasting is used to predict the outcome of an event that will assist in the planning of a project. This work was therefore done to highlight the role of forecasting in event planning. This research paper is a statistical study that has been done on three forecasting techniques based on historical data obtained from two event organizing companies. The paper examines which method is most appropriate for planning an event and predicts the number of visitors per day by using the most the optimal technique. The three forecasting techniques that were used are Naïve approach, Exponential Smoothing (ES), and Period Moving Averages (PMA). The optimal approach was chosen on the basis of the error percentage using median absolute deviation (MAD). The key findings of this work have shown that the most accurate forecast technique was the period moving average, as it has demonstrated a low percentage of error in the MAD analysis. Thus, the outcome of this work has shown that forecasting method supports event planning companies to build a full pre-planning process.