Purpose – Many supply contracts are employed in practice to improve the performance of supply chains. But there is a lack of research that can offer guidance to practitioners in choosing the best supply contract among a group of popular contracts. This paper aims to fill this gap by developing...

From its foundation, operational research (OR) has made many substantial contributions to practical forecasting in organizations. Equally, researchers in other disciplines have influenced forecasting practice. Since the last survey articles in JORS, forecasting has developed as a discipline with...

Purpose: Spare parts have become ubiquitous in modern societies and managing their requirements is an important and challenging task with tremendous cost implications for the organisations that are holding relevant inventories. An important operational issue involved in the management of spare...

Empirical research suggests that quantitatively derived forecasts are very frequently judgementally adjusted. Nevertheless, little work has been conducted to evaluate the performance of these judgemental adjustments in a practical demand/sales context. In addition, the relevant analysis does not...

A new forecast-based dynamic inventory control approach is discussed in this paper. In this approach, forecasts and forecast uncertainties are assumed to be exogenous data known in advance at each period over a fixed horizon. The control parameters are derived by using a sequential procedure....

This paper examines the introduction of modularisation and semesterisation at ten UK-based business schools. Using this case study evidence, it is argued that the main reasons for the introduction of these schemes were the personal ambitions of senior managers, pressure from external regulatory...

Intermittent demand patterns are characterised by infrequent demand arrivals coupled with variable demand sizes. Such patterns prevail in many industrial applications, including IT, automotive, aerospace and military. An intuitively appealing strategy to deal with such patterns from a...

The standard method to forecast intermittent demand is that by Croston. This method is available in ERP type solutions such as SAP and specialised forecasting software packages (e.g. Forecast Pro), and often applied in practice. It uses exponential smoothing to separately update the estimated...

Previous research has shown that the forecast accuracy is to be distinguished from the performance of the forecasts when utility measures are employed. This is particularly true in an inventory management context, where the interactions between forecasting and stock control are not yet fully...

Spare parts have become ubiquitous in modern societies, and managing their requirements is an important and challenging task with tremendous cost implications for the organisations that are holding relevant inventories. Demand for spare parts arises whenever a component fails or requires...