A significant amount of work has investigated inventory control problems associated with fresh produce. Much of this work has considered deteriorating inventory control with many models having been proposed for the various situations that exist. However, no researchers have specifically studied fresh produce which has its own special characteristics. Most research categorise fresh produce into ...

A critical aspect of blood transfusion is the timely provision of high quality blood products. This task remains a significant challenge for many blood services and blood systems reflecting the difficulty of balancing the recruitment of sufficient donors, the optimal utilization of the donor's gift, the increasing safety related restrictions on blood donation, a growing menu of specialized bloo...

A result in the Bayesian inventory management literature is: If lost sales are not observed, the Bayesian optimal inventory level is larger than the myopic inventory level (one should “stock more” to learn about the demand distribution). This result has been proven in other studies under the assumption that inventory is perishable, so the myopic inventory level is equal to the Bayesian optimal ...

The use of VMI at Wal-Mart on a large scale has attracted a great deal of attention in the industrial world. In a VMI program, the supplier assumes control of the inventory management for one or more retailers (Fry, 2002). The supplier monitors the inventory level at the retailers and makes the decisions related to the quantities of replenishment and the timing of shipments to the retailers. It...

Retail inventory productivity is of considerable interest to retailers, manufacturers and distributors who service them, and stock market analysts. Inventory turnover is frequently used to measure inventory productivity. We find wide variation in inventory turnover across retailers and over time. The causes of this variation have not been studied systematically to our knowledge. We develop a lo...