Stochastics and Statistics
Forecasting demand for single-period products: A case study in the apparel industry

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2010.11.001Get rights and content

Abstract

The problem considered is that of forecasting demand for single-period products before the period starts. We study this problem for the case of a mail order apparel company that needs to order its products pre-season. The lack of historical demand data implies that other sources of data are needed. Advance order data can be obtained by allowing a selected group of customers to pre-order at a discount from a preview catalogue. Judgments can be obtained from purchase managers or other company experts. In this paper, we compare several existing and new forecasting methods for both sources of data. The methods are generic and can be used in any single-period problem in the apparel or fashion industries. Among the pre-order based methods, a novel ‘top-flop’ approach provides promising results. For a small group of products from the case company, expert judgment methods perform better than the methods based on advance demand information. The comparative results are obviously restricted to the specific case study, and additional testing is required to determine whether they are valid in general.

Introduction

In the apparel industry, three prominent developments contribute to the complexity of forecasting: shortening product life-cycles, increasing product variety, and globalization of sourcing and manufacturing. The impact of each of these developments will be discussed in detail.

Ninety-five percent of SKUs (Stock Keeping Units) change every selling season (Gutgeld and Beyer, 1995). Because product life-cycles are short, there are no historical demand data that can be used to obtain a priori demand forecasts, i.e. before any demand has been realized. Furthermore, the number of in-season replenishment opportunities after observing demand and updating forecasts accordingly is limited and the risk of product obsolescence is high.

Due to global competition, faster product development, technological advances, increasingly flexible manufacturing systems, and more demanding consumers, an unprecedented number and variety of products are competing for demand (Fisher et al., 1994). As a result, the volume of sales per SKU is very low (Gutgeld and Beyer, 1995), and demand for SKUs within the same product line can vary significantly (Abernathy et al., 2000). Thus, even if aggregate demand can be predicted with some certainty, it is very difficult to predict how that demand will be distributed over the many products that are offered. The complexity of production planning and ordering increases accordingly.

The bulk of products is produced in South East Asia, and hence the lead time to Western retailers is long. The typical lead time from fabric manufacturers is 3 months (Gutgeld and Beyer, 1995). The specific mail order company that we study faces lead times of 6–14 weeks. Long lead times dictated by powerful suppliers and strong competition from other retailers trying to secure enough production capacity force retailers to commit to initial order quantities long, usually several months, before the start of the selling season. We remark that there are a few well-known apparel/fashion retailers like Zara and Hennes & Mauritz that have deviating strategies based on local manufacturing. However, for the large majority of apparel retailers, who have a low-cost focus and often sell private label products, the situation is as we described.

So, for most products that an apparel retailer sells in any season, a demand forecast is needed well before the start of the season, when no historic demand data is available. An apparel retailer’s success hinges to a large extent on the accuracy of those pre-season forecasts on which the initial orders are based. These initial orders comprise the bulk of the total volume ordered (Fisher and Raman, 1999). Additional in-season replenishment opportunities, if available, are essentially emergency replenishment opportunities and only serve to prevent shortages resulting from possible initial underestimation of demand. We refer interested readers to Mostard and Teunter (2006) for a further discussion and analysis of inventory control issues. In this paper, the focus is on forecasting.

To obtain maximum accuracy of initial forecasts, there are two common practices for gathering relevant information. First, a so-called preview is common in the apparel industry (see, e.g., Tang et al., 2004, Fisher and Rajaram, 2000, Chambers and Eglese, 1986). During a two to five week period before the start of the selling season (the preview period), customers can pre-order products at a small discount. Second, many apparel retailers use a committee of experts (e.g. purchasers, planners) to provide forecasts for individual products (see, e.g., Mantrala and Rao, 2001, Fisher et al., 2000, Raman, 1999).

In this paper, we propose new forecasting methods based on advance demand information, and perform a case study to compare them to existing ones based on advance demand information and also to methods based on expert judgments. Numerical results are obtained using data from a large mail order/Internet retailer based in the Netherlands. This company currently bases its forecasts on advance demand information. Based on a data set of around seven hundred SKUs and for two successive summer seasons, we compare the accuracy of the various methods based on advance demand information. For a smaller subset of around one hundred SKUs, we also obtained forecasts from a number of company experts. For this subset, we compare methods based on these expert judgments to methods based on advance demand information.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: We will first give an overview of the relevant literature in Section 2 and outline our contributions. In Section 3, we describe the different forecasting methods. Section 4 introduces the case company and available data in more detail. The empirical results are described in Section 5. Finally, we present our conclusions, discuss limitations, and provide directions for further research in Section 6.

Section snippets

Literature review: forecasting demand for single period (fashion) products

Fashion products in general are characterized by high demand uncertainty, high stockout costs and a high risk of obsolescence (Lee, 2002). Although the specific mail order company that we study can be classified as an apparel company rather than a fashion company, it shares these characteristics. This is evidenced by the fact that the company frequently has significant leftovers of individual SKUs which cannot be carried over to the next season and need to be sold at high markdowns. Customer

Forecasting methods

We will discuss methods that forecast based on advance demand analysis in Section 3.1, and then continue in Section 3.2 with expert judgment methods. For all methods, we let N denote the set of SKUs in an upcoming selling season for which demand forecasts are needed, and N denote the number of SKUs in N.

Application: a large mail order/Internet retailer

The case company is a mail order/Internet apparel retailer operating only in the Netherlands. It divides each year into two selling seasons, spring–summer (December–June) and autumn–winter (June–December). One main catalogue is issued per season, and several smaller catalogs appear throughout the year, containing special collections or special offers aimed at specific groups of customers. A total of around 80,000 SKUs are offered, distributed over three collections: apparel, furniture and

Empirical results

In this section, we will compare the five forecasting methods using the case study data described in Section 4. Methods 1–3 will first be compared for the full data set (assortment groups 1–3) and in their forecasting accuracy for Season 2 (based on Season 1) and Season 3 (based on Season 2). Then, for Assortment group 1 and Season 3, Methods 1–3 will also be compared to Methods 4 and 5 based on expert judgment.

We used three different performance measures of forecast accuracy: mean absolute

Conclusion and recommendations

For a large set of SKUs and in two successive selling seasons, we have compared the accuracy of three quantitative forecasting methods based on advance (preview) demand information. The methods all use a top-down approach, and first forecast the aggregate total demand for a group of SKUs by scaling up the aggregate preview demands. They differ in the subsequent division of that aggregate forecast over the individual SKUs; proportional to preview demand (Method 1), equal (Method 2), or top-flop

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