Many companies use time as a means of differentiating themselves in the marketplace. In many literatures, the controllable lead time is regarded as a decision variable and decomposed into several components, each having a crashing cost function for the respective reduced lead time. When an item is out of stock, the loyal, patient and captive customers will wait until the outstanding orders arri...

In practice the items received in a lot may contain defective items, and the screening process to eliminate the defective items may involve both a Type I and a Type II error. Due to the defective items and the inspection errors, shortages may sometimes occur. In this paper, we develop an economic order quantity model with imperfect quality items, inspection errors, shortage backordering, and sa...

Determining an order quantity when quantity discounts are available is a major interest of material managers. A supplier offering quantity discounts is a common strategy to entice the buyers to purchase more. In this paper, EOQ models with incremental discounts and either full or partial backordering are developed for the first time. Numerical examples illustrate the proposed models and solutio...

We study a stationary, single-stage inventory system, under periodic review, with fixed ordering costs and multiple sales levers (such as pricing, advertising, etc.). We show the optimality of (s, S)-type policies in these settings under both the backordering and lost-sales assumptions. Our proof is novel, more direct and easier to understand than earlier ones. ∗Department of Industrial Enginee...

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...

We study the inventory control problem of a retailer working under stochastic demand and stochastic limited supply. We assume that the unfilled part of the retailer's order is fully backordered at the supplier and replenished with certainty in the following period. As it may not always be optimal for the retailer to replenish the backordered supply, we also consider the setting in which the ret...