Erica Pastore visited the Lancaster Centre for Forecasting (LCF) for almost six months after attending the 19th IIF Workshop on Supply Chain Forecasting for Operations held in Lancaster. During her visit, Erica collaborated with Prof John Boylan on the subject of the Bullwhip effect and the impact of demand level to demand variability propagation.

Evidence for the existence of this impact is based upon previous empirical findings in Erica’s research within the context of a European spare part supply chain. Subsequently, the collaboration of Erica and John intends to tackle this problem from a theoretical point of view. In that, they investigate the bullwhip effect in a supply chain where final demand is characterised by an AR(1) process with unknown parameters and studied the impact of the sample size used to estimate parameters and the updating frequency of the parameter estimates on the propagation of demand variability.

Erica Pastore is a third year PhD student at the Department of Management and Production Engineering (DIGEP), Politecnico di Torino, Italy. Her PhD deals with the analysis and the innovation of CNH Parts & Service Supply Chain.