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 ...

This paper examines the cost-reduction effect of “postponed” routing decisions in a two-echelon supply chain. When a delivery vehicle leaves the warehouse with system replenishment quantities, it sequentially makes routing decisions to choose the next retailer to visit. To measure this effect this paper studies combined vehicle routing and inventoryallocation policies designed to minimize total...

Market-makers have the obligation to trade fixed amounts of assets at quoted bid or ask prices, and their inventories are exposed to the potential loss when the market price moves in an undesirable direction. One approach to reduce the risk associated with price uncertainty is to adjust the inventory at the price of losing potential spread gain. For a single-asset model, we show that a threshol...

In this paper, we consider a Markovian model for a two-echelon inventory/return system. The system consists of a supply plant with infinite capacity and a central warehouse for inventory and returns. There are also a number of local warehouses which are also capable of re-manufacturing of returns to products. To obtain a high service level of handling inventory and returns, lateral transshipmen...

A new two-layered optimisation-based control approach is developed for multi-product, multi-echelon supply chain networks. The first layer employs simple feedback controllers to maintain inventory levels at all network nodes within pre-specified targets. The feedback controllers are embedded as equality constraints within an optimisation framework that incorporates model predictive control prin...

Consider a continuous-review, serial inventory system with N stages. Material flows from stage N to stage N − 1, N − 1 to N − 2, etc., until stage 1, where stationary compound Poisson demand occurs. Let and denote the demand rate and the mean of demand size, and D t denote the demand over a time interval t. There is a constant lead time Lj for stage j . Define L̃i = ∑i j=1Lj . Inventory is contr...

In this paper, we apply continuous review (S-1, S) policy for inventory control in a three-echelon supply chain (SC) including r identical retailers, a central warehouse with limited storage space, and two independent manufacturing plants which offer two kinds of product to the customer. The warehouse of the model follows (M/M/1) queue model where customer demands follow a Poisson probabilit...

This paper reviews inventory models with multiple supply options and discusses their contribution to supply chain management. After discussing strategic aspects of supplier competition and the role of operational flexibility in global sourcing, inventory models which use several suppliers in order to avoid or reduce the effects of shortage situations are outlined. Further, related inventory pro...