Inventory Management for Consumer Products: A Distribution Center in Thailand

Abstract

The objective of the study is to formulate an appropriate order quantity policy. A best-selling product, a cleaner fresher mouth, was selected to be a representative of this study. Monthly Sales data of the cleaner fresher product was collected from January 2013 to December 2021, for 9 years, to forecast the sales of each product. Two forecasting techniques i.e. Exponential Smoothing and Box-Jenkins methods were compared to select the appropriate forecasting method by using MSE criterion. It was found that the Triple Exponential Method was the suitable forecasting model to forecast demand for the cleaner fresher products. These forecast values were then applied in inventory planning to determine the order policy by using Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) method of inventory management. The results found that EOQ technique resulted in a reduction in total cost rather than the company's current technique by 27.80 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">%</sup> •