For Today's Logistics Manager, It's a Jungle out There! Customer-mandated programs with a wide variety of names (JIT, Quick Response, Vendor Managed Inventory, etc.) all share common requirements such as compliance labeling and shrinking order-cycle times. Internal demands to reduce inventory levels coupled with an ever-increasing number of stock keeping units (SKUs) makes the job even more dif...

Vendor managed inventory (VMI) replenishment is a collaboration between a supplier and its customers where the supplier is responsible for managing the customers’ inventory levels. In the VMI setting we consider, the supplier exploits synergies between customers, e.g., their locations, usage rates, and storage capacities, to reduce distribution costs. Due to the intricate interactions between c...

This work is motivated by the need to solve the inventory routing problem when implementing a business practice called vendor managed inventory replenishment (VMI). With VMI, vendors monitor their customers’ inventories, and decide when and how much inventory should be replenished at each customer. The inventory routing problem attempts to coordinate inventory replenishment and transportation i...

The strategy of integration known as VMI (Vendor-Managed Inventory) allows the coordination of inventory policies between producers and buyers in supply chains. Based on a new proposed model for the implementation of VMI in a chain of two links composed of a producer and a buyer, this paper studies the evolution of individual strategies of the producer and the buyer by a formalism derived from ...

In this paper we present a model and solution procedures of the Inventory Routing Problem (IRP) encountered in vending machine supply chains working under vendor-managed inventory (VMI) scheme. The new IRP model is built based on the existing Periodic Vehicle Routing Problem with Time-windows (PVRPTW). The model will be referred to as the Integrated Inventory and Periodic Vehicle Routing Proble...