In 2001, Deere’s Commercial and Consumer Equipment (C&CE) Division, with growing sales of $3 billion, set out to improve its on-time delivery from plants to dealers and to reduce its inventory while maintaining customer service levels. C&CE used state-of-the-art inventory optimization techniques embedded in SmartOps’ multistage inventory planning and optimization (MIPO) product to set trustwort...

Efficient inventory management is a complex process which entails the management of the inventory in the whole supply chain. The dynamic nature of the excess stock level and shortage level from one period to another is a serious issue. In addition, consideration of multiple products and more supply chain members leads to very complex inventory management process. Moreover, the supply chain cost...

Most real-world projects require material supplies at various stages. Project-driven supply chains (PDSCs) are the combinations of project activities and their supporting material supply chains where the demand for the latter is driven by the material requirement of the former. Material supply decisions (e.g., inventory positioning) and project decisions (e.g., resource planning, project schedu...

In this work the management of a production system with a high mixture of products, interdependent demands and optional components is analyzed. An approach based on reorder point policy is proposed for both raw parts and finished goods inventory control. In the latter case, the solution of an optimization problem determines whether each product should be held in inventory and if so which safety...

We consider an optimization problem for a multiclass queueing model of a decentralized production-distribution system: A single server can produce a variety of products, and completed units pass through an infinite server delay node on their way to a warehouse inventory. Each product has its own warehouse, demand for each product is satisfied by its associated inventory, and unsatisfied demand ...

M any firms face environments with long manufacturing leadtimes, great product variety, and uncertain, nonstationary demand. A challenge is how to plan production and inventories to provide the best customer service at the least cost. In this paper, we first describe an application at Teradyne in which we implemented an inventory hedge to protect against cyclic demand variability. Based on this...