Enhancing Inventory Management Decisions in a Bakery: A Case Study

This work aims to establish assertive inventory policies for the raw materials in a Portuguese bakery. The demand behaviour of some items was analysed, using the ABC classification, and 14 main items were prioritised. Using Holt-Winters’ additive method, the demand for these items was forecast until the end of 2023. With these forecast data, the paper presents a simulation and comparison between two different inventory policies, the continuous review model and the periodic review model, and also presents an estimate of current inventory costs. As expected, the periodic review model presented higher inventory costs than the continuous review model, due to the higher safety stocks needed. The results of this paper are a starting point for the company to decide what inventory management method fits better.