Читать книгу Intermittent Demand Forecasting - John E. Boylan - Страница 54

Intermittent demand items dominate the stock bases in many industries, and in their capacity as service parts constitute a major opportunity for financial gains in the after‐sales market. In this book, we treat service parts as independent demand items and discuss estimating their future requirements and appropriately replenishing their inventories.

Owing to their inherent slow movement, an important decision relates to whether intermittent demand items should be kept in stock at all. Simple rules that rely upon a forecast of the mean demand may be employed to reach such decisions.

Assuming that an item is stocked, an appropriate policy is needed to decide when to replenish its inventory and by how much. We have argued for the relevance of periodic stock control policies, including the use of the periodic policy (also known as the order‐up‐to (OUT) level rule) to manage intermittent demand items. The operation of this policy depends on the service measure employed and the distribution of demand, to be discussed in detail in the next three chapters. We return to the question of forecasting in Chapters 6 and 7.