Several changes in the macro environment of the companies over the last two decades have meant that the competition is no longer constrained to the product itself, but the overall concept of supply chain. Under these circumstances, the supply chain management stands as a major concern for companies nowadays. One of the prime goals to be achieved is the reduction of the Bullwhip Effect, related ...

Labour as a Buffer: Do Temporary Workers Suffer? In this paper, we investigate whether or not there is an equal opportunities dimension to regulating equal pay and conditions for temporary work. We develop a “buffer stock” model of temporary work that suggests a number of reasons why ethnic minorities and women may be more likely to be on fixed-term contracts than comparable white males. Using ...

Probabilistic model; Inventory; Varying order cost; Holding cost; Lead-time demand; Uniform distribution; Safety stock Abstract This paper discusses the probabilistic backorders inventory system when the order cost unit is a function of the order quantity. Our objective is to minimize the expected annual total cost under a restriction on the expected annual holding cost when the lead time deman...

This study deals with the problem of dependence between production and failure rates within the context of multi part-type production system. It gives an answer about how to produce, i.e. the production rates, and what to produce, i.e. the part-type selection, over a finite horizon of H periods of equal length. We consider a single randomly failing and repairable machine that produces a multi p...

We consider a manufacturer’s stochastic production/inventory problem under periodic review and present concepts for safety stock determination to cope with uncertainties that are caused by stochastic demand and different types of yield randomness. Order releases follow a linear control rule. Taking manufacturing lead times into account it turns out that safety stocks have to be considered that ...

Exponential smoothing is often used to forecast lead-time demand for inventory control. In this paper, formulae are provided for calculating means and variances of lead-time demand for a wide variety of exponential smoothing methods. A feature of many of the formulae is that variances, as well as the means, depend on trends and seasonal effects. Thus, these formulae provide the opportunity to i...

I this paper we study how the time-series structure of the demand process affects the value of information sharing in a supply chain. We consider a two-stage supply chain model in which a retailer serves autoregressive moving-average (ARMA) demand and a manufacturer fills the retailer’s orders. We characterize three types of situations based on the parameters of the demand process: (i) the manu...

Most research on order splitting have focused on the reduction of safety stock in the multiple sourcing setting. Moreover, all works study the use of order splitting for the continuous review inventory systems. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of the multiple-delivery arrangement in the sole sourcing environment. In addition, we concentrate on the reduction of cycle stock for perio...

In today’s business environment, the dynamics of the business drive many decisions in the supply chain. Companies will buffer inventory, carry excess capacity and headcount, and have costly marketing initiatives in order to handle the dynamics of the business. In order to better analyze the business dynamics and define supply chains that are robust to changes in the business environment, Compaq...