Forecasting monthly farm tractor demand for India using MSARIMA and ARMAX models

Abstract

Because of long product development cycles, effective production planning of automobiles requires accurate demand forecasting in order to effectively managing resources and maximizing revenue. Errors in demand forecasts have often led to enormous costs and loss of revenue due to suboptimal utilization of resources. Since early 2000 India has been the largest manufacturer and consumer of farm tractors in the world. This paper develops multiplicative seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (MSARIMA) and autoregressive moving average model with exogenous variable (ARMAX) to forecast monthly demand for farm tractor. The result indicates that ARMAX with real agriculture credit has found to be outperformed MSARIMA model in forecasting demand of farm tractors in the horizon of six months. The accurate monthly forecasting of farm tractor would help the manufacturers for better raw material, inventory and supply chain management.