Business Trend Analysis

The direction, the movements and the course of a trend suggest not only what happened in the past but what might happen in the future. The objective of the trend analysis is the resolution of a particular question, such as “Is the number of system failures increasing over time?” and “Does the sales growth justify the installation of an additional production line?” The analysis answers the question by evaluating changes in a collection of values of a variable, such as the changes in the mean daily sales revenues for a product, mean monthly failures of a product part or the actual number of daily help desk calls over time. The sequence of observations is simply a collection of a variable’s measurements taken at specific times or at equal time intervals. From these historic values, it’s possible to derive expected values at particular points, which form a sequence of values or a trend that is progressively increasing or decreasing.