Afuzzyforecastingmodelforapparelsales.docVIP

A Fuzzy Forecasting Model for Apparel Sales Les M. Sztandera*1, Celia Frank2, Balaji Vemulapalli2, Amar Raheja3 1Computer Information Systems Department, Philadelphia University, Philadelphia, PA, USA 2School of Textiles and Materials Technology, Philadelphia University, Philadelphia, PA, USA 3California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, CA, USA Keywords: Apparel, Forecasting, Computing, Sales, Modeling, Multivariable 1. Abstract Forecasting sales is an essential part of supply chain management and is required to sustain profitability. A good sales forecasting model is one, which takes into account all the factors affecting it. Apparel sales are affected by both exogenous factors like size, price, color, climatic data, price changes, marketing strategies and endogenous factors like time. Although traditional statistical forecasting models are very popular, they model sales only on previous sales data and tend to be linear in nature. Soft computing tools like fuzzy logic and ANN can efficiently model sales taking into account both exogenous and endogenous factors and allow arbitrary non-linear approximation functions derived (learned) directly from the data. In this paper, a multivariable fuzzy logic approach has been investigated for forecasting womens’ apparel sales and the performance was evaluated by comparing with ANN model. Five months sales data (August-December 2001) was used as back cast data in our models and a forecast was made for one month of the year 2002. The performance of the models was tested by comparing one of the goodness-of-fit statistics, R2, and also by comparing actual sales with the forecasted sales. An R2 of 0.93 was obtained, which is significantly higher than those of 0.75 and 0.90 found for Single Seasonal Exponential Smoothing and Winters’ Three Parameter model, respectively. Yet another model, based on artificial neural network approach, gave an R2 averaging 0.82. 2. Data Collection Sales data containing multiple independent va