On the stock control performance of intermittent demand estimators

The purpose of this paper is to assess the empirical stock control performance of intermittent demand estimation procedures. The forecasting methods considered are the simple moving average, single exponential smoothing, Croston's method and a new method recently developed by the authors of this paper. We first discuss the nature of the empirical demand data set (3000 stock keeping units) and we specify the stock control model to be used for experimentation purposes. Performance measures are then selected to report customer service level and stock volume differences. The out-of-sample empirical comparison results demonstrate the superior stock control performance of the new intermittent demand forecasting method and enable insights to be gained into the empirical utility of the other estimators.