In the fast-changing business environment, supply chains are affected by the production and inventory strategies, which influence the amount of information needed by the chains. The firms must therefore determine the best supply chain inventory strategies for their products. The lack of precise market demand and reliable supplier’s stock level makes it inappropriate to use the statistically-bas...

Collaboration has been recognized as a significant process that holds the value creation opportunity in supply chain management. Evaluating the value of collaboration is thus necessary for developing the effective collaboration mechanisms. This paper presents the evaluation approach specifically focusing on the supply-side collaboration on inventory decisions between a supplier and a distributo...

This paper considers a multistage serial inventory system with Markov-modulated demand. Random demand arises at Stage 1, Stage 1 orders from Stage 2, etc., and Stage N orders from an outside supplier with unlimited stock. The demand distribution in each period is determined by the current state of an exogenous Markov chain. Excess demand is backlogged. Linear holding costs are incurred at every...

Different from the previous articles on multi-echelon deteriorating inventory, this paper explains economic implications of Weibull parameters for cold chain inventory rather than restricting to mathematical sense. A case study shows that DC warehousing activities and total throughput scale factor has a significant effect profit compared with storage technology environment shape factor. The imp...

In supply chain networks, the flow of material occurs between various business entities such as suppliers, manufactures, distributors and retailers, which can be considered as the various echelons (levels) in a multi-echelon supply chain network. Spare parts supply chain management deals with optimizing stocking, purchasing, repairing and disposing activities of purchased parts and their compon...

We consider a distribution system with a central warehouse and multiple retailers. The warehouse orders from an outside supplier and replenishes the retailers which in turn satisfy customer demand. The retailers are nonidentical, and their demand processes are independent compound Poisson. There are economies of scale in inventory replenishment, which is controlled by an echelon-stock, batch-tr...