Читать книгу Intermittent Demand Forecasting - John E. Boylan - Страница 47

The fundamental purpose of any inventory control system is to provide answers to the following four questions (Brown 1967):

1 How should the stock status records be maintained?

2 How often should the test for reordering be made?

3 When should a replenishment order be placed?

4 How large should the replenishment order be?

In this section, we have been concerned with the first two questions. We have considered the relationship between recording of transactions and review of inventory and explained why ‘true’ continuous inventory review is less likely to be encountered in practice than periodic review. The differences between periodic and continuous review systems have also been discussed in detail with regard to their rationale, the time intervals over which uncertainties in demand need to be taken into account, and the forecasts that are relevant for replenishment purposes.

Having established the importance and forecasting implications of the first two questions, we now move to the second two questions. It will take a number of chapters to answer these questions fully, but the first step is to determine the most appropriate inventory policy. To inform this decision, we now provide an overview of stock control policies that may be used for intermittent demand items.