Inventory replenishment rules contribute significantly to the bullwhip effect and inventory instability in supply chains. Smoothing replenishment rules have been suggested as a mitigation solution for the bullwhip effect but dampening the bullwhip effect might increase inventory instability. This paper evaluates a real-time inventory replenishment system denoted as SPC that utilizes a control c...

In this paper, a multi-product continues review inventory control problem within batch arrival queuing approach (MQr/M/1) is modeled to find the optimal quantities of maximum inventory. The objective function is to minimize summation of ordering, holding and shortage costs under warehouse space, service level, and expected lost-sales shortage cost constraints from retailer and warehouse viewpoi...

The Field Service (FS) Organization of many companies constitutes a vital Department playing an important role to their success. Field Service managers need some tools to analyse the impact of their decisions on customer service level, which must be as high as possible (at least 95%), and inventory cost, trying to reduce it to a minimum level (its ratio to the total FS revenue must be less than...

The literature on inventory control discusses many methods to establish the level of decision parameters-like reorder levels or safety factors-, necessary to attain a prescribed service level. In general, however, these methods are not easy applicable: they often use time-consuming iterations, requiring specific software. In particular, large-scale application on huge numbers of stock keeping i...

In most multi-item inventory systems, the ordering costs consist of a major cost and a minor cost for each item included. Applying for every individual item a cyclic inventory policy, where the cycle length is a multiple of some basic cycle time, reduces the major ordering costs. An e cient algorithm to determine the optimal policy of this type is discussed in this paper. It is shown that this ...

We consider a multi-location inventory system where inventory choices at each location are centrally coordinated. Lateral Transshipments are allowed as recourse actions within the same echelon in the inventory system to reduce costs and improve service level. However this transshipment process usually causes undesirable lead times. In this paper, we propose a multiobjective model of the multi-l...

In 2007, Intel’s Channel Supply Demand Operations launched an initiative to improve its supply chain performance. To ensure success, the process had to fit within the existing planning processes. In practice, this meant that setting service-level and inventory targets, which had previously been external inputs to the process, had to become part of the structured decision-making process. Althoug...

Closed loop supply chain aims at integrating return products in the traditional supply chain processes. The return flows generate new uncertain elements (returns and leadtimes) and optimization of inventory control in this context is a complex issue. Inventory policies have to generate good performances (service level, cost) and be easy to implement in practice. A supply chain model based on si...