Manufacturers undergoing servitization resort to an increased number of suppliers to deliver services. Although managing upstream relationships is particularly critical in servitized contexts, theory development on this topic is still at an early stage. This study analyses the linkages between...

Many inventory control studies consider either continuous review and continuous ordering, or periodic review and periodic ordering. Mixtures of the two are hardly ever studied. However, the model with periodic review and continuous ordering is highly relevant in practice, as information on the...

ABC classifications are commonly used to streamline a large number of SKUs into fewer, more manageable categories. As Aris, John, and Ruud explain, this classification may be useful for inventory control, but it does not provide much help in the selection of appropriate forecasting methods. The...

Intermittent demand items account collectively for considerable proportions of the total stock value of any organization. Forecasting the relevant inventory requirements constitutes a very difficult task and most work in this area is based on Croston’s estimator that relies upon exponentially...

This study compares three different scheduling policies in the Master Surgical Scheduling context with respect to three performance criteria: efficiency, i.e. the capability of scheduling a large number of surgeries; balancing, i.e. the capability to distribute workload fairly among the...

Forecasting seasonal products can be difficult when the products are fairly new or highly variable. The Spring 2007 issue of Foresight contained a special feature on modeling seasonality in short time series. The articles addressed the issues of minimum sample size requirements and surveyed the...

Forecasting by temporal aggregation is the process of aggregating demands from higher-frequency to lower-frequency time buckets Ð for example, aggregating daily data to weekly Ð and using the aggregate time series to generate forecasts. This intuitively appealing approach will almost always...

John and Aris distinguish between forecase-accuracy metrics, which measure the errors resulting from a forecast method, and accuracy-implication metrics, which measure the achievement of the organization's stockholding and service-level goals. Both measurements are important. The correct choice...