Operationalizing Demand Forecasts in the Warehouse Signature Redacted Signature Redacted Dr. Bruce Arntzen Executive Director, Supply Chain Management Program Signature Redacted Operationalizing Demand Forecasts in the Warehouse

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. Acknowledgments I would like to thank my family, friends, and fellow SCM students for their support and encouragement. I would like to thank my family, friends, MIT faculty, and fellow SCM students for supporting me through this experience.