This book describes the methods used to forecast the demands at inventory holding locations. The methods are proven, practical and doable for most applications, and pertain to demand patterns that are horizontal, trending, seasonal, promotion and multi-sku. The forecasting methods include regression, moving averages, discounting, smoothing, two-stage forecasts, dampening forecasts, advance demand forecasts, initial forecasts, all time forecasts, top-down, bottom-up, raw and integer forecasts, Also described are demand history, demand profile, forecast error, coefficient of variation, forecast sensitivity and filtering outliers. The book shows how the forecasts with the standard normal, partial normal and truncated normal distributions are used to generate the safety stock for the availability and the percent fill customer service methods. The material presents topics that people want and should know in the work place. The presentation is easy to read for students and practitioners; there is little need to delve into difficult mathematical relationships, and numerical examples are presented throughout to guide the reader on applications. Practitioners will be able to apply the methods learned to the systems in their locations, and the typical worker will want the book on their bookshelf for reference. The potential market is vast. It includes everyone in professional organizations like APICS, DSI and INFORMS; MBA graduates, people in industry, and students in management science, business and industrial engineering.
I reviewed this book in issue 37 of *Foresight*, and I can’t recommend **not buying it** strongly enough. This book is the absolutely worst piece of garbage ever to have come out of Springer.
It uses nonstandard jargon that does not tie in with other textbooks or ongoing forecasting or inventory control research. For instance, exponential smoothing is presented, but not called by its name, so how would you be able to find more info on it? It doesn’t discuss the most fundamental error measures like the MAPE, MAD or MSE. It presents the very same utterly trivial (and misleading) rounding algorithm twice. And finally, the copyediting is an unmitigated disaster, with the typos starting out on the very first page with “Supply Change Management”.
Here is the conclusion to my review in *Foresight*, which I still stand behind: Stay away from this book.
I reviewed this book in issue 37 of *Foresight*, and I can’t recommend **not buying it** strongly enough. This book is the absolutely worst piece of garbage ever to have come out of Springer.
It uses nonstandard jargon that does not tie in with other textbooks or ongoing forecasting or inventory control research. For instance, exponential smoothing is presented, but not called by its name, so how would you be able to find more info on it? It doesn’t discuss the most fundamental error measures like the MAPE, MAD or MSE. It presents the very same utterly trivial (and misleading) rounding algorithm twice. And finally, the copyediting is an unmitigated disaster, with the typos starting out on the very first page with “Supply Change Management”.
Here is the conclusion to my review in *Foresight*, which I still stand behind: Stay away from this book.