A supply chain forecast and planning application for small businesses

Supply chain demand forecast and inventory purchase planning are essential business operations to many businesses. In this paper, we discuss the strategies and techniques in the supply chain demand forecast and inventory purchase planning for small businesses from practitioner's perspective. The strategies and techniques include using point-of-sales (POS) data for better demand forecast, designing and developing an Excel-based spreadsheet modelling tool to assist the decision-making. The paper demonstrates: 1) forecasting techniques using regression model; 2) purchase planning using Excel-based spreadsheets; 3) data lookup techniques to link sales, purchase and inventory data.