• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.18 no.34
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• pp.193-204
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• 1995

Many studies show that the value of the warehouse is good. However, studies explicitly mention the tradeoff between costs of operating the warehouse and benefits from the warehouse. Also, it is important to know when the benefits overcome the costs. We study a one-warehouse/N-retailer(s,Q) distribution system with stochastic lead times in order to answer two questions: "What are the optimal policies of the system that minimizes total system costs\ulcorner" and given the optimal policies, "Is the value of the warehouse always good\ulcorner" We use an analytical model for answering the questions. We find that the optimal policies are different from those with deterministic lead times. In fact it is reverse. We alse find the existence of the breakeven point beyond which the benefits starts overcomming the costs. And, we show that one of the breakeven points is the mean ratio of a supplier's lead time to transportation lead time between the warehouse and the retailer. Finally, we show that the breakeven point is sensitive to the ratio of holding costs of the warehouse and the retailer and it is also sensitive to the unit backorder costs at the retailer.sts at the retailer.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.38 no.3
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• pp.159-168
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• 2015

Aggregate Production Planning determines levels of production, human resources, inventory to maximize company's profits and fulfill customer's demands based on demand forecasts. Since performance of aggregate production planning heavily depends on accuracy of given forecasting demands, choosing an accurate forecasting method should be antecedent for achieving a good aggregate production planning. Generally, typical forecasting error metrics such as MSE (Mean Squared Error), MAD (Mean Absolute Deviation), MAPE (Mean Absolute Percentage Error), and CFE (Cumulated Forecast Error) are utilized to choose a proper forecasting method for an aggregate production planning. However, these metrics are designed only to measure a difference between real and forecast demands and they are not able to consider any results such as increasing cost or decreasing profit caused by forecasting error. Consequently, the traditional metrics fail to give enough explanation to select a good forecasting method in aggregate production planning. To overcome this limitation of typical metrics for forecasting method this study suggests a new metric, WACFE (Weighted Absolute and Cumulative Forecast Error), to evaluate forecasting methods. Basically, the WACFE is designed to consider not only forecasting errors but also costs which the errors might cause in for Aggregate Production Planning. The WACFE is a product sum of cumulative forecasting error and weight factors for backorder and inventory costs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed metric by conducting intensive experiments with demand data sets from M3-competition. Finally, we showed that the WACFE provides a higher correlation with the total cost than other metrics and, consequently, is a better performance in selection of forecasting methods for aggregate production planning.