Recently, innovation-oriented firms have been competing along dimensions other than price lead time being one such dimension. Increasingly, customers are favoring lead time guarantees as a means to hedge supply chain risks. For a maketo-order environment, we explicitly model the impact of a lead time guarantee on customer demands and production planning. We study how a firm can integrate demand...

We consider a production-inventory system with capacity constraint and item returns correlated to demand. The system is modelled by an M/M/1 make-to-stock queue with lost sales. A satisfied demand incurs an item return with a certain probability, after an exponentially distributed return lead-time. We distinguish two cases: When the number of items to be returned is observable and when it is no...

Shortening lead times in a business process is important for meetings service level agreements, decreasing inventories and working capital, keeping customers satisfied and in short: staying in business. Process mining methods make it possible to generate a large amount of transaction event data and case attributes that are useful for analysing lead times. However, finding root causes for long l...

Cycle time reduction often requires coordination across a broad range of functions and groups within an organization. This article describes a decision engineering approach that has proved useful in the analysis and tactical implementation of cycle time reduction at Sun Microsystems. First, a simple model called the Decision Chain is introduced to illuminate the interdependencies among decision...

More and more companies on the global market are today capable of manufacturing individual or small-series orders at comparable prices and quality. The main difference between these companies is the expected production order development-time and the observance of delivery deadlines. Before making a bid, the sales department must establish what operations will have to be carried out for a partic...

In this issue of the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, the American Board of Family Medicine presents 4 original research articles about sleep-related topics. This signals a growing recognition of the role of sleep disorders/complaints in health and well-being and of sleep medicine’s relevance to the practice of family medicine. There are several themes that arise in these resea...

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...

The pressure to reduce inventory investments in supply chains has increased as competition expands and product variety grows. Managers are looking for areas they can improve to reduce inventories without hurting the level of service provided. Two areas that managers focus on are the reduction of the replenishment lead time from suppliers and the variability of this lead time. The normal approxi...

In this paper a general methodology is proposed based on robust optimization for an inventory control problem subject to uncertain demands and uncertain lead times. Several lead time uncertainty sets are proposed based on the budget uncertainty set, and a set based on the central limit theorem (CLT). Robust optimization models are developed for a periodic review, finite horizon inventory contro...