We consider a periodic-review inventory system with one warehouse and N non-identical retailers. Each location has a positive lead time and orders according to a base-stock policy in fixed time interval. A fixed cost is incurred for each inventory reorder. The warehouse fills the retailers’ orders in the same sequence as the original demand. The objective is to minimize the long-run average sys...

Many online retailers provide real-time inventory availability information. Customers can learn from the inventory level and update their beliefs about product quality. Thus, consumer purchasing behavior may be impacted by the availability information. Based on a unique setting from Amazon lightning deals, which displays the percentage of inventory consumed in real time, we explore whether and ...

Vendor managed inventory is a continuous replenishment program that is designed to provide major cost saving benefits for both vendors and retailers. Previous research on this area mainly included single objective optimization models where the objective is to minimize the total supply chain costs or to maximize the total supply chain benefits. This paper presents a bi-objective mathematical mod...

This paper deals with an i * Corresponding author Email address:   nventory system with one central warehouse and a number of identical retailers. We consider perishable-on-the-shelf items; that is, all items have a fixed shelf life and start to age on their arrival at the retailers. Each retailer faces Poisson demand and employs (1, T) inventory policy. Although demand not met at a retai...

Inventory is one of the most significant investments in the retail sector. A $4.0B arts and craft specialty retailer may hold up to $0.9B of inventory while a $45B pharmacy retailer may invest as much as $8.5B in inventory. Therefore, in order to maximize the Return on Investment (ROI), every retailer should ensure that extraneous inventory investments are kept to the minimum. Facts confirm tha...

In this paper, we discuss the replenishment decision of seasonal products in a two-echelon distribution system consisting of a supplier and multiple retailers. Due to long manufacturing lead time, the supplier orders its entire stock for the season well in advance. The retailers, on the other hand, can replenish their inventory from the supplier throughout the season as demand realizes. Demand ...

We analyze three queueing control problems that model a dynamic stochastic distribution system, where a single capacitated vehicle serves a finite number of retailers in a make-to-stock fashion. The objective in each of these vehicle routing and inventory problems is to minimize the long run average inventory (holding and backordering) and transportation cost. In all three problems, the control...

Physical store retailers are facing a tougher situation than ever. In order to tackle this tough situation, they need not only to reduce cost by effectively executing SCM but also to introduce measures to increase profit like CRM. They are effective by themselves, but if they are combined the retailers can enjoy more benefits from these practices. However, there is no good application that real...

This study aims to determine the value of vendor-managed inventory (VMI) over independent decision making with information sharing (IS) under non-stationary stochastic demand with service-level constraints. For this purpose, we utilize mixed-integer linear programming formulations to quantify the benefits that can be accrued by a supplier, multiple retailers and the system as a whole by switchi...