This study considers a multi-stage multi-item production plant with its supply chain and customer environment. The production, supply and inventory plan is optimized on a dual-mode basis, under two different information patterns. The short-term plan relies on firm orders received from customers. On the contrary, the long-term plan is based on predicted demands represented by random sequences. I...

In recent years, there has been an increasing adoption of returns policies in the coordination of the supply chain, where market demand is always assumed to be satisfied by manufacturing or by ordering from suppliers. However, many industries face the important decision of how to balance their inventory level. This problem has long been studied in financial institutions such as banks. This stud...

There is a growing consensus that a portfolio of customers with different demand lead times can lead to higher, more regular revenues and better capacity utilization. Customers with positive demand lead times place orders in advance of their needs, resulting in advance demand information. This gives rise to the problem of finding effective inventory control policies under advance demand informa...

The order fill rate is less commonly used than the volume fill rate (most often just denoted fill rate) as a performance measure for inventory control systems. However, in settings where the focus is on filling customer orders rather than total quantities, the order fill rate should be the preferred measure. In this paper we consider a continuous review, base-stock policy, where all replenishme...

In this paper we consider a stochastic inventory system with production, remanufacturing, and disposal operations. Customer demands must either be fulfilled from the production of new products or by the remanufacturing of used products. Used products are either remanufactured or disposed of. To coordinate production, remanufacturing and disposal operations efficiently, we extend the PUSH and PU...

This paper examines the determinants of bid-ask spreads and their behaviour around corporate earning announcement dates, for a sample of UK firms over the period 1986-94. The paper finds that closing daily spreads are affected by order processing costs (proxied by trading volumes), inventory control costs (trading volumes and return variability) and asymmetric information (unusually high tradin...