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L.L Bean, Inc. Item Forecasting and Inventory Management

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L.L Bean, Inc.
Item Forecasting and Inventory Management

2012/24/11
Q1. How do LL Bean use past demand data and a specific item forecast to decide how many units of that item to stock? Evaluate the LL Bean's forecasting system (i.e., merits vs. shortfall).

One of the most important decision making process in business is forecasting. It can help to make your business more profitable. You should be able to guess how many units of that item to stock based on your past data and predicting future demand. Following two processes used by L.L. Bean, to find how many units of that item to stock:
First, they used forecasting to predict for that specific item for upcoming season, which is named “frozen forecasting”. It is based on the book forecast and past demand data, which provided by forecasting department.
Second, they used historical forecast errors, namely the A/F rations, which mean actual demand multiplied past season’s forecast.
L.L. Bean estimates the range of inventory that the product will be in the upcoming season after converting the point forecast into demand distribution. For instance as the article shows that if last year new products had this ration between 0.7 and 1.6 then where frozen forecast is 1000 that means the new product could have an actual demand for the upcoming year of 700 to 1600 units. In order to find out how much profit each unit brought in compared to how much the unit would lose if it was liquidated, they used profit margin calculation. It has also clarified in article with simple example, as follows: suppose the unit was purchased at $15 each and $30 were received from the sell, the profit for that item would be $15 dollars per unit ($30 - $15 = $15). At the same time, if the unit liquidated it could be sold for $10, were the lose would be $5 dollars per unit. Based on above calculations, they determined the actual order size

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