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...

Most research on supply chain management deals with settings where firms do not voluntarily get rid of inventory in the system. Since voluntary inventory reductions are often observed in practice, in this paper, we propose a (multi-echelon) model where the firm can dispose of excess stock through sales in the secondary market at each stage in the supply chain. What are called nested echelon bas...

We derive approximations for the service levels of two-echelon inventory systems with lost sales and Poisson demand. Our method is simple and accurate for a very broad range of problem instances, including cases with both high and low service levels. In contrast, existing methods only perform well for limited problem settings, or under restrictive assumptions.

We consider a two-echelon single commodity inventory system with one warehouse(supplier) at the higher echelon and one retailer at the lower echelon. The retailer stocks individual items of a commodity and satisfies unit demands which occur according to a Poisson process. The supplier stocks these items in packets and uses these packetsto: (i) satisfy the demands that occur for single packet an...

This paper deals with divergent logistic networks where the inventory at each node is controlled using a periodic review strategy with order-up-to level. An approximate method is presented to analyse the network performance (service levels, mean physical stock). The method is tested on a range of Z-echelon and 3-echelon networks by comparison to results from Monte Carlo simulation. We conclude ...

Abstract: Inventory control systems development is one of the most appealing issues of the supply chain management which have recently been studied by academicians and practitioners. In this paper, an inventory management framework and deterministic cost models within the context of this framework are structured for effective supply chain (SC) in an agile environment. To do so, we propose a thr...

Customers and downstream supply chain partners often place, or can be induced to place, orders in advance of future requirements. We show how to optimally incorporate advance demand information into periodic-review, multiechelon, inventory systems in series. While the state space for series systems appears to be formidably large, we decompose the problem across locations, as in Clark and Scarf ...