Operationalizing demand forecasts in the warehouse
Author(s)
Li, Dan, Ph. D. University of Rochester; Kim, Kyung![Thumbnail](/bitstream/handle/1721.1/99810/927177010-MIT.pdf.jpg?sequence=3&isAllowed=y)
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Other Contributors
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division.
Advisor
Bruce Arntzen.
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Demand planning affects the subsequent business activities including distribution center operational planning and management. Today's competitive environment requires distribution centers to rapidly respond to changes in the quantity and nature of demand. For the distribution center, accurate forecasts will help managers to accordingly plan operational activities. In the present thesis, we evaluate the plausibility of leveraging the SKU level forecast to predict equivalent operational activities in the warehouse. Through literature review, we identified the key drivers in distribution center operation and management. We further chose outbound shipment picking time as our measurement to perform the evaluation between demand forecast and actual warehouse shipments. The thesis concludes with the presentation of results of the evaluation discussions regarding the rolling horizon based forecast and the potential areas to improve the accuracy. This work will help warehouse managers to perform root cause analysis to examine the discrepancy between the units/labor forecast and actual units/labor. Our work will also help warehouses achieve greater operational efficiency.
Description
Thesis: M. Eng. in Logistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2015. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Includes bibliographical references (pages 48-49).
Date issued
2015Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems DivisionPublisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Keywords
Engineering Systems Division.