Spare parts generate high sales margins and improve customer loyalty by extending the useful life of base products. Forecasting and managing the spare-parts business is challenging, however, due in no small measure to short life cycles and long support life for the base products. At...

Forecasting for products with short life cycles is a well-known challenge. Jerry, Matthew, and Fereydoon describe an approach they developed to forecast printer demand at Hewlett-Packard. The approach has two components: one, which they call the automatic Product Life Cycle (PLC) method, is...