Members of supply chain carry inventory for different purposes. To effectively reduce the cost of inventory, information sharing mechanism is the key. The inventory can be managed in two ways in supply chain systems. The first one is the centralized inventory management system, in which, the information of inventory is highly exchanged among supply chain members. The other is the decentralized ...

Lateral transshipments within an inventory system are stock movements between locations of the same echelon. These transshipments can be conducted periodically at predetermined points in time to proactively redistribute stock, or they can be used reactively as a method of meeting demand which cannot be satisfied from stock on hand. The elements of an inventory system considered, e.g. size, cost...

One of the main supply chain deficiencies is the bullwhip effect: demand fluctuations increase as one moves up the supply chain from retailer to manufacturer. The Beer Distribution Game is widely known for illustrating these supply chain dynamics in class. In this paper we present a spreadsheet application, exploring the two key causes of the bullwhip effect: demand forecasting and the type of ...

Supply chain coordination has become a critical success factor for supply chain management (SCM). In the past few years, the researchers have widely emphasized that cooperation among supply chain (SC) firms is a key source of competitive advantage. This paper is focused on supply chain coordination from the perspective of inventory management. Li and Liu [1] developed a model for illustrating h...

Supply chain management is an integrative approach for planning and control of materials and information flows with suppliers and customers as well as between different functions within a company. One particularly important element in supply chain management is the management of inventories. This field has received considerable attention during the last years. Nevertheless, most quantitative an...

This paper considers a two-level supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and two buyers. The manufacturer produces one type of products at a finite rate and replenishes them to the buyers. Each buyer’s demand is sensitive to his selling price and the backorder is allowed at the buyers. Moreover, it is assumed that the buyers delay paying for goods to the manufacturer and two types of delay in...

One area in which experimental economics methods have been used to study operations problems is supply-chain management. We survey results from a series of human experiments based on the popular beer distribution game and find cognitive limitations on the part of managers, in particular an underweighting of the supply line. We suggest mechanisms that may alleviate this bias, including sharing i...

A supply-chain is a series of connected stock management structures. Therefore, the structure of a supply-chain consists of many cascading inventory management problems. It is known that the optimal inventory control parameter values suggested by the literature are also valid for a supply-chain. The motivation for this study is to investigate the effect of the literature suggested optimal value...

We consider a two-echelon supply chain: a single retailer holds a finished goods inventory to meet an i.i.d. customer demand, and a single manufacturer produces the retailer’s replenishment orders on a make-to-order basis. In this setting the retailer’s order decision has a direct impact on the manufacturer’s production. It is a well known phenomenon that inventory control policies at the retai...