Predicting deliveries from suppliers : A comparison of predictive models

Sammanfattning: In the highly competitive environment that companies find themselves in today, it is key to have a well-functioning supply chain. For manufacturing companies, having a good supply chain is dependent on having a functioning production planning. The production planning tries to fulfill the demand while considering the resources available. This is complicated by the uncertainties that exist, such as the uncertainty in demand, in manufacturing and in supply. Several methods and models have been created to deal with production planning under uncertainty, but they often overlook the complexity in the supply uncertainty, by considering it as a stochastic uncertainty. To improve these models, a prediction based on earlier data regarding the supplier or item could be used to see when the delivery is likely to arrive. This study looked to compare different predictive models to see which one could best be suited for this purpose. Historic data regarding earlier deliveries was gathered from a large international manufacturing company and was preprocessed before used in the models. The target value that the models were to predict was the actual delivery time from the supplier. The data was then tested with the following four regression models in Python: Linear regression, ridge regression, Lasso and Elastic net. The results were calculated by cross-validation and presented in the form of the mean absolute error together with the standard deviation. The results showed that the Elastic net was the overall best performing model, and that the linear regression performed worst.