Periodic control of intermittent demand items: theory and empirical analysis

Abstract In this paper we propose a modification to the standard forecasting, periodic order-up-tolevel inventory control approach to dealing with intermittent demand items, when the lead-time length is shorter than the average inter-demand interval. In particular, we develop an approach that relies upon the employment of separate estimates of the interdemand intervals and demand sizes, when demand occurs, directly for stock control purposes rather than first estimating mean demand and then feeding the results in the stock control procedure. The empirical performance of our approach is assessed by means of analysis on a large demand data set from the Royal Air Force (RAF, UK). Our works allows insights to be gained on the interactions between forecasting and stock control as well as on demand categorization related issues for forecasting and inventory management purposes.