What is the appropriate raw material inventory strategy for a make-to-order manufacturing company? As companies grow in size and the business environment changes over time, many companies adapt their operating policies to remain competitive. However, some policies, such as raw material inventory policies, are left untouched as "legacies" of the company's past due to lower priorities or lack of ...

A make-to-order environment requires flexibility in the supply chain to facilitate fast response. Timely supply deliveries can be achieved in a cost-effective manner by having a portfolio of suppliers, or a portfolio of contracts with a single supplier, with different lead times and associated costs. In this paper we address the inventory management of such a system and evaluate the savings ass...

We study periodic-review inventory replenishment problems with fixed ordering costs, and show the optimality of (s, S) inventory replenishment policies. We consider several sales mechanisms, e.g., auction mechanisms, name-your-own-price mechanisms, and multiple heterogeneous sales channels. We prove this result by showing that these models satisfy a condition given by Huh and Janakiraman (2004)...