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UB Engineering interns optimize forecasting and order quantities

A team of 6 graduate students from the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department of the University at Buffalo worked under the guidance of Michael Gebera and Lou Oliveri on a two-month long production planning project at Tapecon. The project was mainly concerned with Forecasting and Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) calculations for raw materials listed as critical items.

Forecasting is an attempt to estimate future demands using past data. It is essential to prepare the industry for what can be expected in the future. In this project at Tapecon, different trends for forecasting were evaluated and appropriate forecasting methods were applied to estimate demand of critical raw materials. Forecasting approaches used include: MAPE, MSE, MAD, and HOLT’s. Since Tapecon has a continuous inventory review system in place through Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), lot size reorder model was chosen to implement inventory control policy for the critical items. Safety stock materials were also reevaluated.

The main objectives of this project was to implement better forecast capability, optimize the inventory and meet customer requirements while trying to minimize the annual inventory cost. The team successfully accomplished these objectives while also making the deliverable forecasting tool robust and easy to use through Python Programming.

Special thank you to UB Engineering and the interns pictured above and listed below for assisting Tapecon with our forecasting project: Aasha Rathnaraj, Parth  Patel, Parth Shah, Preet Desai, Pruthvi Patel, Swapnil Gorhe.

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