Global Sourcing is becoming a common practice in industrial activities since it offers companies opportunities to improve its competitiveness in an increasingly competitive business environment. At the same time, it makes the flows more complex and the supply chain more fragile. Global Sourcing thus gives rise to a wide range of issues and impacts different levels of decision making. To address such a problem, we focus on tactical and operational decision making. We attempt to answer a variety of questions: What are possible actions for flow management in global sourcing? How to secure the procurement in the current industrial context? Are classical flow management policies also efficient in global sourcing? In collaboration with the industrial partners of the Chaire Supply Chain at Ecole Centrale Paris, we consider different problems. Firstly, we are interested in demand forecasting, an essential element for flow management in global sourcing and proposed a methodology to select an appropriate forecasting method and to update it dynamically. The fact that the lead times are long in global sourcing makes the forecast less reliable and less and less reliable when the forecast horizon increases, which requires an evaluation of the forecast accuracy. We propose a detailed model of the forecast accuracy and its evolution with time horizon involved. As the last step of the work, this forecast accuracy model is applied to a real life flow management problem in global sourcing. The case study carried out based on real life data from PSA demonstrates a clear superiority of the proposed method over existing ones in terms of both service level and inventory level.
