Читать книгу Intermittent Demand Forecasting - John E. Boylan - Страница 38

Generally, demand is not known in advance in a make to stock environment, where the products need to be in stock when the customer orders are received. The lead time in these cases is expected (as far as the customers are concerned) to be equal to the time taken to ship the product to the customers' premises or, in the retailing sector, the lead time is expected to be zero: it is on‐the‐shelf availability that drives business.

In this book, we consider the case of stochastic demand in make to stock environments. (For an interesting discussion on how intermittent demand may be treated in MTO environments, please refer to the work of Bartezzaghi and Verganti 1995, briefly summarised in Technical Note 2.1.) But given the fact that demand is inherently slow moving, is it always worthwhile keeping an item in stock? This issue is discussed in Section 2.3. In practice, it should be addressed before determining ordering policies and their forecasting requirements.