Operating strategies for production planning of seasonal products

As a type of demand, seasonal demand is extremely common but is difficult to manage efficiently. There are several studies in the literature investigating this problem. However, they introduce very complex policies or constraints not particularly close to real operating conditions (e.g. they consider a fixed profile of seasonality). As a result, companies manage this kind of demand using only their experience, usually applying stock based policies and consequently obtaining high storage levels. This paper presents a first set of results dealing with the performance study of two production planning methods that are effective in seasonal conditions: Anticipatory stock policy - (ASP) and Increased ratio policy - (IRP). These two methodologies are studied and compared using different seasonal demand patterns: three multi-level factors and twenty-four scenarios are investigated. Interesting observations about their real performance and suitability are presented.