One of the most known policy of inventory management is the order quantity and reorder point, or <Q, r> policy. The purpose of this paper is to present a new analytical approach for evaluating reorder points in inventory management policies. This approach considers the reorder point as a function of forecasted demands in the planning horizon, which can vary through time. Lead-times and forecast errors are the uncertainties present in the model. The composed distribution of these parameters is used to obtain an analytical expression for the proposed forecast based reorder point. Simulation experiments are performed in order to validate and test the accuracy of the proposed model. The experiments consider different lead-time and demand distributions and also different magnitude of forecast errors. Beyond the accuracy of the analytical model the simulations seeks to evaluate the premises adopted, mainly the one of normally distributed lead-time demand.
inventory; reorder point; forecast; simulation
