-
Demand forecasting for companies with many branches, low sales numbers per product, and non-recurring orderings
(2006)
- We propose the new Top-Dog-Index to quantify the historic deviation of the supply data of many small branches for a commodity group from sales data. On the one hand, the common parametric assumptions on the customer demand distribution in the literature could not at all be supported in our real-world data set. On the other hand, a reasonably-looking non-parametric approach to estimate the demand distribution for the different branches directly from the sales distribution could only provide us with statistically weak and unreliable estimates for the future demand.
