The use of VMI at Wal-Mart on a large scale has attracted a great deal of attention in the industrial world. In a VMI program, the supplier assumes control of the inventory management for one or more retailers (Fry, 2002). The supplier monitors the inventory level at the retailers and makes the decisions related to the quantities of replenishment and the timing of shipments to the retailers. It...

We consider the inventory-routing problem in a three-level distribution system with a single vendor, a single warehouse and many geographically dispersed retailers. In this problem, each retailer faces a demand at a deterministic, retailer-specific rate. The demand of each retailer is replenished either from the warehouse by a small vehicle or from the vendor bypassing the warehouse by a big ve...

Buffer management (BM) is an inventory management methodology introduced by theory of constraints (TOC). In this practice, the retailer passes his demands to the vendor in ‘almost a daily manner’ and has a ‘dynamic inventory buffer’ that reflects the change in demand patterns allowing the vendor the opportunity to replenish his inventory and obtain some market information. In this paper, we con...

The single-vendor single-buyer integrated production inventory system has been an object of study for a long time, but little is known about the effect of investing in reducing ordering cost on the integrated inventory models with backorder price discount and variable lead time. The purpose of this article is to investigate in the continuous review model with backorder price discount and variab...

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...

Managing inventories is crucial to the objective of minimizing supply chain costs. This paper presents an approach for setting inventory norms in context of a real-life case of an industry which practices Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI). The role of warehouses and the inventories held by them becomes significant in such an environment. This paper presents a two-phase approach to determine variou...