Demand Forecasting in a Supply Chain - Components of a forecast and forecasting methods

4 important questions on Demand Forecasting in a Supply Chain - Components of a forecast and forecasting methods

Give 6 factors that are related to the demand forecast, which a company should be knowledgeable about

  1. Past demand
  2. Lead time of product replenishment
  3. Planned advertising or marketing efforts
  4. Planned price discounts
  5. State of the economy
  6. Actions that competitors have taken

Give 4 types of forecasting methods

  1. Qualitative; primarily subjective, rely on human judgment
  2. Time series; historical demand is used to make a forecast
  3. Causal; assume that the demand forecast is highly correlated with certain factors in the environment
  4. Simulation; imitate the consumer choices that give rise to demand to arrive at a forecast.

What is the difference between a systematic and a random component of demand?

The systematic component measures the expected value of demand and consists of what we will call level, the current deseasonalized demand, trend, the rate of growth or decline in demand for the next period, and seasonality, the predictable seasonal fluctuations in demand.
The random component is the part of the forecast that deviates from the sytematic part, everything that cannot be predicted, you can only try to filter out the random component and estimate the systematic component.
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What is the forecast error?

it measures the difference between the forecast and actual demand. On average a good forecasting method has an error whose size is comparable to the random component of demand.

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