Macarry's Bicycle Company Macarry's Bicycle Company makes and sells high-quality bicycles, primarily to larger North American bicycle retail outlets and to some wholesalers for smaller retail shops. They have several models, and most of those models have a fairly large number of options that can be mixed for a very large number of possible designs. The bicycles, for example, can be made in a number of colors, type of seats, number of speed settings (gears), type of tires and wheels, type of brakes, and handlebar styles. In addition, there are several options that can be included or not, including headlights and taillights, water bottle carriers, baskets, or kickstands. In such an environment, it is clearly difficult to know how much inventory to carry or produce for each of the options. Several years ago the company decided they could not establish a master schedule for each combination of all the options. That would literally imply creating thousands of master schedules (one for each type of bicycle that is possible to make), and some of those combinations might, in fact, never be ordered. Instead they decided to make a master schedule for each of the options for a bicycle model and another one for the common parts for the model (e.g., a particular model has only one frame, and most of the connectors are common, such as nuts and bolts). The common part forecast was based on the total number of bicycles of a model type they planned to sell in a given period, and that allowed