Medium-term forecasting

A forecast is a prediction of some event or events. Forecasting is an important problem that spans many field including business and industry, government, economics, environmental sciences, medicine, social science, politics and finance. An organization uses forecasting as a starting point to the annual business planning exercise. This typically constitutes medium term forecasting.

In medium-term forecasting, the planning horizon is usually 12-18 months. During this period, some aggregation of data is done.

For example, of an organization offers 15 variations of a product, the demand for the product is estimated at an aggregate level. To handle seasonality in demand across a time period form 6 months to 1 year, medium-term forecast is used to build up seasonal inventory, budgeting and work force planning.

It allows a firm to have a horizon of 6-12 months for managing resource planning and budgeting.

In budgeting, medium-term forecasting is used to project gaps between anticipate revenues and expenditures during the next one to five years. This prompts policy discussion and hopefully decisions to close these gaps.
Medium-term forecasting

Intelligent resource planning

Resource planning is an integral part component of service chain management as it ensures that customer commitments are met, that a high quality service is maintained and that operation costs are kept as low as possible.

A method dealing with optimizing the overall flow of demand and supply data is known as IRP or Intelligent Resource Planning.

Intelligent Resource Planning is an Enterprise Resource Planning that use a knowledge and reasoning to perform a difficult which usually performed only by an expert.

The main aim is to flex the available resources so that they match the expected demand for sources as closely as possible. Intelligent Resource Planning allows an enterprise to build relationship between various activities.

This identification of relationship between activities enables one to optimally identify the demand-supply chain.
Intelligent resource planning