We study joint replenishment and clearance sales of perishable goods under a general finite lifetime and a last-in-first-out (LIFO) issuing rule, a problem common in retailing. We show that the optimal policies can be characterized by two thresholds for each age group of inventory: a lower one and a higher one. For an age group of inventory with a remaining lifetime of two periods or longer, cl...

⎯We consider a two-echelon supply chain with two retailers and one supplier. The retailers are supplied by the supplier who makes all the decisions and bears all the inventory risk. Throughout this paper, we consider two different inventory systems: a reserved inventory system and a pooled inventory system. With the reserved inventory system, the supplier keeps separate inventories for each ret...

This article discusses inventory management of perishable items, including the differences between inventory models that consider items’ perishability and the standard models that ignore this issue. We hope that this article will help fostering the interest of students and researchers in inventory control of perishable items, and ultimately help improving the inventory control of perishable ite...

This work is motivated by the need to solve the inventory routing problem when implementing a business practice called vendor managed inventory replenishment (VMI). With VMI, vendors monitor their customers’ inventories, and decide when and how much inventory should be replenished at each customer. The inventory routing problem attempts to coordinate inventory replenishment and transportation i...

We study how a manager’s short-term interest in the firm’s market value may motivate channel stuffing: shipping excess inventory to the downstream channel. Channel stuffing allows a manager to report sales in excess of demand in order to influence investors’ valuation of the firm. We apply an inventory model which highlights the potential role of inventory in the manager’s channel stuffing and ...

Inventory represents a significant investment of capital for most companies. Inventory ties up money that could be used more productively elsewhere. Thus, effective inventory management offers the potential for significant cost savings. Furthermore, quality, product engineering, prices, overtime, excess capacity, ability to respond to customers (due-date performance), lead times, and overall pr...

Inventory control policies have been recognized as a contributory factor to the bullwhip effect and inventory instability. Previous studies have indicated that there is a trade-off between bullwhip effect and inventory performance where the bullwhip effect reduction might increase inventory instability. Therefore, there is a need for inventory control policies that can cope with supply chain dy...

The primary purpose of this paper is to highlight for the research community and practitioners the various aspects of using VMI-type supply chains in today’s business environment as well as a number of directions for future studies. In this regard, fifty articles published in major international journals, beginning in 1995, which contribute to the VMI-type supply chains are reviewed via a syste...

Globalization is putting enormous pressure on the business organizations specially manufacturing one to rethink the supply chain in innovative manners. Inventory consumes major portion of total sale revenue. Effective and efficient inventory management plays a vital role for the successful functioning of any organization. Selection of inventory policy is one of the important purchasing activiti...

This paper estimates the long-run stock price effects of excess inventory using nearly 900 excess inventory announcements made by publicly traded firms during 1990-2002. It examines the stock price effects starting one year before through two years after the excess inventory announcement date. Statistically significant abnormal returns are observed during the year before the announcement and on...