Authors: Christos Zikopoulos, Ioannis Rokkos

Title: Configuration and Analysis of Ordering Policies in the Fashion Industry

Abstract

The ability to configure a rational decision system that takes into account the special characteristics of a specific market or industry sector can be very important under the circumstances that firms in the fashion industry usually face. Such decision systems can provide a solid ground for managers to base their procurement decisions, to review and improve the policies that they implement and to eliminate a great deal of unjustified and empirical methods that have been used during a long period of intuition-based, heuristic-originated procurement management. In the current paper, motivated by the case of a well-known Greek apparel trading company, we configure and study a procurement policy that foresees order quantity updates as the selling period approaches and offers the opportunity of increased availability of demand information and improved forecasts. The proposed procurement policy provides the benefits of timely ordering of adequate quantity to secure a certain extent of products’ availability and at the same time maintains a certain degree of flexibility by reserving a part of the order quantity to be ordered after the point of time that more accurate forecasts become available, providing thus on-time delivery of the products and improved matching of supply with customer demand.