Abstract
Short-term demand forecasting plays a pivotal role in a company’s success as it affects several decisions in the supply chain from procurement to stockpiling, and purchasing to distribution. The related literature is very rich in terms of demand estimation models; however, as in the case of configurable products, they usually suffer from the curse of dimensionality when there is an abundance of parameters to estimate. Configurable products allow consumers to create the product variant they have in mind by choosing predefined product attributes from a drop-down list. Basically, a configuration refers to a combination of (binary) product attributes offered by the manufacturer. A large number of attributes can easily complicate the demand estimation process. Besides, if these attributes have too many levels, then such a product, in theory, can have millions of different configurations. This would, in turn, lead to biased coefficient estimates since in this case, experiencing shortage of customers in the marketplace is inevitable. In this study, we utilize various text mining techniques on online consumer reviews of a configurable product to ease its demand estimation process. We identify the most important attributes considering their frequency of mentioning in the reviews and the way they were mentioned (positive, negative, neutral).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Berger, I.E., Cunningham, P., Drumwright, M.E.: Mainstreaming corporate social responsibility: developing markets for virtue. Calif. Manage. Rev. 49, 132–157 (2007)
Boone, T., Ganeshan, R., Hicks, R.L., Sanders, N.R.: Can Google Trends improve your sales forecast? Prod. Oper. Manage. 27, 1770–1774 (2018)
Cave, A.: What will we do when the world’s data hits 163 Zettabytes in 2025? Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 4 Nov. (2018). www.forbes.com/sites/andrewcave/2017/04/13/what-will-we-do-when-the-worlds-data-hits-163-zettabytes-in-2025. Accessed 10 Mar 2019
Chan, S.W.K., Chong, M.W.C.: Sentiment analysis in financial texts. Decis. Support Syst. 94, 53–64 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2016.10.006
Chong, A.Y.L., Li, B., Ngai, E.W.T., Ch’ng, E., Lee, F.: Predicting online product sales via online reviews, sentiments, and promotion strategies: a big data architecture and neural network approach. Int. J. Oper. Prod. Manage. 36(4), 358–383 (2016)
Cui, R., Gallino, S., Moreno, A., Zhang, D.J.: The operational value of social media information. Prod. Oper. Manage. 27, 1749–1769 (2018)
Fisher, M.L.: What is the right supply chain for your product? Harvard Bus. Rev. 75(2), 105–116 (1997)
Fisher, M.L., Jain, A., MacDuffie, P.: Strategies for product variety: lessons from the auto industry, designing the firm. Bowman, E., Kogut, B. (eds.) New York: Oxford (1996)
Hatua, A., Nguyen, T.T., Sung, A.H.: Information diffusion on Twitter: Pattern recognition and prediction of volume, sentiment, and influence (pp. 157–167). Presented at the BDCAT 2017 - Proceedings of the 4th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Big Data Computing, Applications and Technologies (2017)
Isikli, Erkan.: Decision support models for the external variety of configurable products. Wayne State University Dissertations. Paper 600 (2012)
Kostakos, P.: Public perceptions on organised crime, Mafia, and Terrorism: A big data analysis based on Twitter and Google Trends. Int. J. Cyber Criminol. 12(1), 282–299 (2018)
Linoff, G.S., Berry, M.J.: (08/2010). Data Mining Techniques: For Marketing, Sales, and Customer Relationship Management, 3rd Edition. VitalSource Bookshelf version
Lowenstein, M.W.: Customers Inside, Customers Outside: Designing and Succeeding With Enterprise Customer-Centricity Concepts, Practices, and Applications. Business Expert Press LLC, USA (2014)
Luis, J., Cusumano, G.: A detection mechanism with text mining cross correlation approach, vol. 2018-January, pp. 3228–3232. Presented at the Proceedings - 2017 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2017 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1109/BigData.2017.8258304
Morimoto, T., Kawasaki, Y.: Forecasting financial market volatility using a dynamic topic model. Asia-Pacific Finan. Markets. 24(3), 149–167 (2017)
Ramdas, K.: Managing product variety: an integrative review and research directions. Prod. Oper. Manage. 12, 79–101 (2003)
Van Den Brakel, J., Söhler, E., Daas, P., Buelens, B.: Social media as a data source for official statistics; the dutch consumer confidence index. Surv. Methodol. 43(2), 183–210 (2017)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Isikli, E., Ketenci, M. (2020). Using Consumer Reviews for Demand Planning: Case of Configurable Products. In: Kahraman, C., Cebi, S., Cevik Onar, S., Oztaysi, B., Tolga, A., Sari, I. (eds) Intelligent and Fuzzy Techniques in Big Data Analytics and Decision Making. INFUS 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1029. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23756-1_44
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23756-1_44
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-23755-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-23756-1
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsIntelligent Technologies and Robotics (R0)