EMPIRICAL VALIDATION OF A DEMAND FORECASTING TECHNIQUE USING CORRELATED PRODUCT DEMAND FOR A NATIONAL RETAILER

摘要

A modification of Croston's (1972) method to forecast demand for slow-moving products withcorrelated demand for a national retailer is empirically tested in this paper. The method is appliedto retail items that generally experience demand when the related item experiences a demand.Simulations by the authors previously showed that an improved forecast could be obtained byutilizing additional demand information from complementary products compared to using singleexponential smoothing (SES) and Croston's method on each product individually. Severalproducts from a national retailer are used to explore the accuracy of the method on data collectedover a two year period in one outlet and validate the proposed technique.