We study a class of two echelon, serial systems with identical ordering capacities or limits for both echelons. For the case where the lead time to the upstream echelon is one period, the optimality of state-dependent, modified echelon base-stock policies is proved using a decomposition approach. For the case where the upstream lead time is two periods, we introduce a new class of policies call...

Multi-echelon distribution systems are quite common in supply-chain and logistic systems. They are used by public administrations in their transportation and traffic planning strategies as well as by companies to model their distribution systems. In the literature, most of the studies address issues related to the movement of flows throughout the system from their origins to their final destina...

Multi-echelon transaction is a common situation in the supply chain nowadays. This research is to formulate a three-echelon integrated inventory model under defective products, reworking and credit period consideration. An algorithm and numerical analysis are used to observe the effect of defective rate and credit period time to the inventory policy and total profit.

We present a two-echelon dual-channel inventory model in which stocks are kept in both a manufacturer warehouse (upper echelon) and a retail store (lower echelon), and the product is available in two supply channels: a traditional retail store and an Internet-enabled direct channel. The system receives stochastic demand from two customer segments: those who prefer the traditional retail store a...

This article examines the origins of interorganizational endorsements in the context of firms undergoing an initial public offering (IPO). We propose that the affiliations associated with the career histories of a firm’s upper echelon, including its managing officers and board members, send important signals to external parties who are evaluating the quality of young firms. Such signals are cri...

T his paper studies echelon stock (R, nQ) policies in serial production/inventory systems with stochastic demand. We provide a recursive procedure to compute the steady state echelon inventory levels of the systems, which can be used to evaluate the long-run average holding and backorder costs as well as other performance measures. The procedure is based upon an observation of a relationship be...

In this paper, an inventory management framework and deterministic costs models within the context of this framework are structured for effective supply chain under deterministic and fuzzy environment. In this regard, we propose a bi-echelon multi-product supply chain in which a central manufacturing firm (lower echelon) with warehouse space limitation is fed through different suppliers (upper ...

Since Clark and Scarf’s pioneering work, most advances in multi-echelon inventory systems have been based on demand processes that are time-independent. This paper revisits the serial multi-echelon inventory system of Clark and Scarf, and develops three key results. First, we provide a simple lower bound approximation to the optimal echelon inventory levels and an upper bound to the total syste...