Product perishability is a major concern of certain industrial sectors, especially the agro-food industry. This paper investigates the effect of product perishability and retailers’ stockout policy on system total cost, net profit, service level, and average inventory level in a two-echelon inventory–distribution system, and develops an approximate inventory model to these system performance me...

The efficient management of a distribution system requires coordination between transportation planning and inventory control. Small and frequent shipments can reduce inventory levels while maintaining high customer service levels, but they increase unit transportation costs due to inappropriate utilization of the vehicles and more handling costs. On the other hand shipment consolidation polici...

We consider the problem of allocating demand arising from multiple products to multiple production facilities with finite capacity and load-dependent lead-times. Production facilities can choose to manufacture items either to-stock or to-order. Products vary in their demand rates, holding and backordering costs, and service level requirements. We develop models and solution procedures to determ...

W consider the problem of allocating demand arising from multiple products to multiple production facilities with finite capacity and load-dependent lead times. Production facilities can choose to manufacture items either to stock or to order. Products vary in their demand rates, holding and backordering costs, and service-level requirements. We develop models and solution procedures to determi...

This paper differentiates between an order (line) fill rate and a volume fill rate and specifies their performance for different inventory control systems. When the focus is on filling complete customer orders rather than total demanded quantity the order fill rate would be the preferred service level measure. The main result shows how the order and volume fill rates are related in magnitude. E...

Materials, manufacturing and marketing departments are the three major operating subsystems of any organization whether it is a production house or a service center, i.e. neither the goods producing organization nor the service providing organizations works without inventory, they have to maintain some inventory for smooth running of their businesses. In recent years, the study of inventory man...

This paper addresses an inventory control problem when common components are allowed and the goal is to minimize the expected units shortage subject to a budget constraint. A two-level assemble-to-order product structure is analyzed when the demands for two end products follow independent mixtures of Erlang distributions. Closed form expressions for the objective function under various scenari...

In this paper we consider a single-item inventory system where two demand classes with different service requirements are satisfied from a common inventory. A critical level, reorder point, order quantity or (s, q, k) policy is in use. The time axis is divided into discrete time units, which is a common characteristic of many real-life supply-chain processes. The inventory process within the le...