Читать книгу Intermittent Demand Forecasting - John E. Boylan - Страница 23

Another important development, to be discussed in detail in Chapter 15, is the availability of open source software of recently proposed intermittent demand forecasting methods. This enables companies to incorporate them in their own in‐house developed solutions, or for commercial software companies to extend their repertoire of methods more readily. Furthermore, sophisticated database systems are enabling companies to ‘slice and dice’ their data more easily. This means that data may be examined more readily by segments, such as geographical regions or product groupings, in forecasting and planning software (e.g. Forecast Pro, Smoothie). This provides the groundwork for implementing developments in forecasting at different levels of aggregation (to be discussed in detail in Chapter 6). However, whilst software solutions are moving ahead by embracing slicing and dicing, they do not do so in terms of new forecasting methods (including those that take advantage of slicing and dicing). There are significant opportunities offered by open source software and modern data analytics to improve the forecasting functionality of commercial software.