Inventory control in sales periods

Abstract

Sales promotion aims to capture the market and increase sales volume. Therefore, an important task is the forecasting of the demand during the sales period. We present two dynamic methodologies for calculating the quantity which has to be placed on the shelves at the beginning of each day such that we keep some constraints expressing lower and upper bounds on the quantities. Both methodologies are new to this field and are useful because of some specific properties of the problem. Our new methods use historical data of the demands in previous promotions and the consumptions registered in the previous days. Since the promotion period is relatively short, other methods such as time series analysis can hardly be used.