A Decision Support System for demand planning: A case study from manufacturing industry

Demand planning is responsible for estimating the demand for products, raw materials, production capacities, and distribution related capacities in a manufacturing organization. The modern supply chains are faced with severe competition and uncertainty. The benefits of having an accurate forecast have never been so important. Many studies have looked at this growing need from practical standpoint. This study envisions to embed the theoretical aspects and the practitioners' views into one solution using R open source technologies to design and develop a Decision Support System for demand planning. The proposed system utilizes open source development tools such as R for analytics and Java environment and it gives an edge over the existing proprietary software solutions for the forecasting and demand planning. The accuracy and the validity are attained by the advanced mathematical modules in R environment for forecasting to offer advanced analytical software at an affordable cost for small or medium ranged enterprises. Furthermore, demand planning plays a strategic role as the planning of wide variety of other activities depends on the accuracy and the validity of this prime activity. Therefore, the techniques used in this study can be extended to other organizations as a generalized approach and to estimate demand forecast within a reasonable forecast accuracy.