The interaction between forecast and inventory control has been under-exposed in the literature. This paper introduces a combined forecast-inventory control procedure that is appropriate especially for the lumpy demand character of spare parts. The proposed procedure is succesfully implemented...

The total yearly costs of medicine usage in The Netherlands are increasing year after year. The Dutch government tries to get this increase under control by price regulations, which forces pharmaceutical manufacturers in The Netherlands to manufacture and distribute more efficiently. In this...

This paper examines the performance of two different (s,Q) inventory models for spare parts in a production plant of confectionery in The Netherlands, a simple and an advanced model. The simple approach is more or less standard: undershoot of the reorder level is not taken into account, the...

In inventory management, hierarchical forecasting (HF) is a hot issue : families of items are formed for which total demand is forecasted; total forecast then is broken up to produce forecasts for the individual items.Since HF is a complicated procedure, analytical results are hard to obtain;...

Keywords: batch process industry; inventory control; production planning;