Modified Ranking With Temporal Association Rule Mining in Supply Chains

This article deals with data mining applications for the supply chain inventory management. ABC classification is usually used for inventory items classification because the number of inventory items is so large that it is not computationally feasible to set stock and service control guidelines for each individual item. Moreover, in ABC classification, the inter-relationship between items is not considered. But practically, the sale of one item could affect the sale of other items (cross selling effect). Hence, within time-periods, the inventories should be classified. In this article, a modified approach is proposed considering both time-periods and cross-selling effect to rank inventory items. A numerical example and an empirical study with a data set are used to evaluate the proposed approach. It is illustrated that by using this modified approach, the ranking of items may get affected resulting in higher profit.