In this research, two risk hedging strategies, the option contract and the advance purchase discount contract, are investigated within a manufacturer–retailer two-echelon supply chain context. This study offers three contributions. First, the optimal decisions under the two contracts from the perspectives of both the manufacturer and the retailer are determined. Second, circumstances under whic...

In 1998, the retail sales and marketing division of Time Inc., the largest publisher of consumer magazines in the US, reviewed its newsstand distribution principles and procedures for its magazines. This review affected the three major distribution decisions: the evaluation of each magazine’s national print order, the wholesaler allotment procedure, and the store distribution process. For this ...

Multi-echelon, multi-indenture spare parts inventory control subject to system availability and budget constraints, Reliability Engineering and System Safety, This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of ...

Devising manufacturing/distribution strategies for supply chains and determining their parameter values have been challenging problems. Linking production management to stock keeping processes improves the planning of the supply chain activities, including material management, culminating in improved customer service levels. In this study, we investigate a multi-echelon supply chain consisting ...

We propose a model that integrates inventory routing and freight consolidation for perishable goods with a fixed lifetime. The problem is motivated by the status quo of logistics in some U.S. agriculture markets, but adapts to other relevant two-echelon supply chains, e.g. combined production planning and distribution. We first identify special cases where solving single-echelon subproblems seq...

Traditionally, manufacturers use past orders (received from some downstream supply chain level) to forecast future ones, before turning such forecasts into appropriate inventory and production optimisation decisions. With recent advances in information sharing technologies, upstream (SC) companies may have access point of sales (POS) data. Such data can be used as an alternative source for fore...

In this note it is proved that if Al (A) is any nondistinguished Kothe echelon space of order one and K. ,0 (AI (A))' is its strong dual, then there is even a linear form : K C which is locally bounded (i.e. bounded on the bounded sets) but not continuous. It is also shown that every nondistinguished Kothe echelon space contains a sectional subspace with a particular structure.

We provide a broad characterization of the supply chain settings in which perfect coordination can be achieved with a simple wholesale pricing scheme based on constant unit wholesale prices or a single quantity discount scheme. We confine ourselves to two-echelon chains with a single supplier servicing a network of retailers who compete with each other by selecting retail prices (Bertrand compe...

We study a multi-item, two-echelon, continuous-review inventory problem at a Dutch utility company, Liander. We develop a model that optimizes the quantities of service parts and their allocation in the two-echelon network under an aggregate waiting time restriction. Specific aspects that we address are emergency shipments in case of stockout, and batching for regular replenishment orders at th...

This paper analyzes a series inventory system with stationary costs and stochastic demand over an infinite horizon. A distinctive feature is that demand can be negative, representing returns from customers, as well as zero or positive. We observe that, as in a system with nonnegative demand, a stationary echelon base-stock policy is optimal here. However, the steadystate behavior of the system ...