Schools out, do you know where your kids are?

There are plenty of days off during the school year for elementary schools and junior highs. Whether it be for Martin Luther King Jr Day, Columbus day, Election Day, Pulaski Day, or even those teacher institute days– kids are off school. The question though is, what to do on a day off from school? Since working at an indoor trampoline park, I’ve found the answer to that question and that is come to where I work and jump around with friends. However, that’s hard to do if my job doesn’t open until 2pm during the week and a lot of our staff are in high school and still have school on those days. This is where forecasting comes into context. Since being open for a year now, the managers now have a better idea of sales and turnout for special holidays. With that information they can forecast the number of customers on days where the surrounding school districts have days off.

Being the main office assistant, I was asked a couple of months ago to create a spreadsheet of all the surrounding school districts’ days off from school. The task involved me having to look up all the school districts in the area 2012-2013 school calendar and from there create an easy-to-read spread sheet of every non-attendance school day. The project itself took me about a week to do but with the final product the managers were able to use the list as a tool to forecast the following: sales, turnout, number of staff needed, and the cost benefit of opening up the store early. The list isn’t the only thing that the managers look at to forecast for the days off. They also look at the previous year’s (for that specific day off) sales and turnout as well as what day of the week the holiday/day off lands on and how many inquiries we’ve received about birthday parties/group reservations for that day (at an earlier time than we open).

Taking into consideration all those factors, I’ve notice the importance of forecasting and how it can really effect a company’s sales if not done the right way or even at all. I have seen the problems that can occur when forecasting is not done such as under staffing, not opening up earlier when we could/should of, and unhappy customers.

5 thoughts on “Schools out, do you know where your kids are?

  1. I agree with what you are saying about opening up earlier on days when students have days off. It would help out your indoor trampoline park by opening early and being prepared with enough staff members to supervise all the kids that attend. There aren’t many holidays during the year for elementary and junior high students so I don’t believe that it would hurt your job if they opened three or four hours earlier that the usual. The project you did creating the spreadsheet should also encourage and show your boss or that there is another way of generating more revenue for the indoor park.

  2. I agree with you on how important forecasting is because you just proved that doing the forecasting can help any kind of business you have. I think the management did a great job about creating a spreadsheet to help the business become better and make the customer happier and not have to worry when their kids are off from schools where they have to take them. I could also related to this because my family owns a 7 eleven and they have to forecast everything before they reorder all the items. When they decided they could do it without forecasting everything went wrong all the orders were not being done right they had problems like more of one item was coming and less of another item that they needed came so then they realized how important forecasting is and continue doing now and it has help us and saved us money by forecasting. So just like you said when forecasting is not done customers and sales will hurt the business.

  3. I have never realize how importance of forecasting too. It is very crucial for business to forecast the sale and even prevents the company from wasting time and money, and marketing a product that will fail.

  4. Forecasting is really important and can be a big factor between making a profit and losing money. The interesting factor with your example is that the days off are deviations from the average trend of customers. The indoor trampoline place will obviously need more workers on the weekends than the weekdays but through forecasting you were able to notice that you also require more staff during days off from school. This type of forecast can be applied to a lot places where youth goes to hang out and have fun.

  5. I find this to be a very good real world example of forecasting. It can be ver critical when it comes to both staffing and placing orders for products that might be needed in the near, or distant future. In this case, it clearly would be a smart move to staff more people at the location when schools have a day off. I don’t know about anyone else here, but I was always up to something when I had a day off school. Locations such as these have higher traffic on weekends and weekdays where either school or work has been called off. I feel as though school is an excellent example. This also applies to the work world. There are many instances where both school and work are out for holidays and so parents bring their children and so on.

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