Semiconductor capital equipment is manufactured in a high-mix and low-volume environment at Varian Semiconductor Equipment business unit of Applied Materials. Due to the demand growth over the past years, Varian has been continuously improving its operations practices to increase the factory capacity without investing additional floor space or labor shifts. A hypothesis-driven analysis is used ...

This paper investigates the impact of setup cost reduction on an inventory policy for a continuous review mixture inventory model involving controllable backorder rate and variable lead time with a service level constraint, in which the order quantity, setup cost, and lead time are decision variables. Our objective is to develop an algorithm to determine the optimal order quantity, setup cost, ...

Lateral transshipments within an inventory system are stock movements between locations of the same echelon. These transshipments can be conducted periodically at predetermined points in time to proactively redistribute stock, or they can be used reactively as a method of meeting demand which cannot be satisfied from stock on hand. The elements of an inventory system considered, e.g. size, cost...

An interesting class of production/inventory control problems considers a single product and a single stocking location, given a stochastic demand with a known non-stationary probability distribution. Under a widely-used control policy for this type of inventory system, the objective is to find the optimal number of replenishments, their timings and their respective order-up-to-levels that meet...

We consider a single-product inventory system that serves multiple demand classes, which differ in their shortage costs or service level requirements. We assume a critical-level control policy, and show the equivalence between this inventory system and a serial inventory system. Based on this equivalence, we develop a model for cost evaluation and optimization, under the assumptions of Poisson ...

Most logistics managers face uncertainty in demand which forces them to hold safety stock to provide high levels of service to their customers. The level of safety stock depends on what the company’s targets are on some performance characteristics of an inventory management decision problem like the expected number of units short or the stock-out probability. In the case only incomplete informa...

Wildlife Service to supply scientific information and methodologies on key environmental issues that impact fish and wildlife resources and their supporting ecosystems. Projects have been initiated in the following areas: coal extraction and conversion; power plants; mineral development; water resource analysts, including stream alterations and western water allocation; coastal ecosystems and O...

The performance analysis of a general production–inventory control system under uncertain demand is presented. In the model, the production order releases are determined based on the information feedback on the forecasted demand, work-in-process discrepancy and inventory discrepancy. Stability conditions are obtained in terms of the control parameters that manage the rate at which the above dis...

The primary objective of this paper is to study the impact of selected inventory parameters and management techniques on the performance of an expanded and comprehensive retail supply chain. Speci"cally, we study the sensitivity of supply chain performance to three inventory planning parameters: (i) the forecast error, (ii) the mode of communication between echelons, and (iii) the planning freq...

This paper studies a perishable inventory model, which assumes that each perishable item has finite lifetime, and only one item is consumed each time. The lifetimes of perishable items are independent random variables with the general distribution and so are the consumption internal. Under this assumption, by using backward equations and limit distribution of Markov skeleton processes, this pap...