Inventory Management for Irregular Shipment of Goods in Distribution Center

Abstract

The shipping amount of commodity goods (Foods, confectionery, dairy products, such as public cosmetic pharmaceutical products) changes irregularly at the distribution center dealing with the general consumer goods. Because the shipment time and the amount of the shipment are irregular, the demand forecast becomes very difficult. For this, the inventory control becomes difficult, too. It cannot be applied to the shipment of the commodity by the conventional inventory control methods. This paper proposes the method for inventory control by cumulative flow curve method. It proposed the method of deciding the order quantity of the inventory control by the cumulative flow curve. Here, it proposes three methods. 1) Power method, 2) Polynomial method and 3) Revised Holt's linear method that forecasts data with trends that is a kind of exponential smoothing method. This paper compares the economics of the conventional method, which is managed by the experienced and three new proposed methods. And, the effectiveness of the proposal method is verified from the numerical calculations.