Inventory allocation decisions in a distribution system concern issues such as how much and where stock should be assigned to orders in a supply chain. When the inventory level of an inventory point is lower than the total number of items ordered by lower echelons in the chain, the decision of how many items to allocate to each “competing” order must take into consideration the trade-off betwee...

In this paper we study forecast and inventory control problems for DVD-by-mail operations. Specifically, we focus on inventory management for in-circulation items after the new release rental peak. For such items, the demand volume is usually low and unpredictable. Leveraging on the unique operational feature of DVD-by-mail services, we propose effective forecast models for itemlevel returns an...

ABSTRACT In this paper, we develop a supply network model for a service facility system with perishable inventory (on hand) by considering a two dimensional stochastic process of the form (L, X) =   0 )); ( ), ( (  t t X t L , where L (t) is the level of the on hand inventory and X (t) is the number of customers at time t. The inter-arrival time to the service station is assumed to be expone...

In this paper we consider a single buyer who wants to outsource the manufacturing of aproduct to N potential suppliers. The buyer’s objective is to maximize the service level shereceives from the suppliers. The suppliers compete for the buyer’s demand based on acompetition parameter which the buyer announces along with an allocation rule. We modeleach supplier as a make-to-s...

any organizations have wrestled with the issues of inventory locations and stocking levels. When it is critical to have inventory available for customers, the traditional approach has been to place a large amount of inventory at all locations. Carrying an excessive amount of inventory achieves a high service level, but can be enormously costly, especially if the product has a high cost per unit...

Rationing is an inventory policy that allows prioritization for different demand classes. This prioritization results in a different service level for each demand class. The mechanism through which the rationing policy is implemented is to stop serving lower priority classes when the inventory on hand drops below a certain critical level. Under this level, only higher priority classes are serve...

A important issue in the management of supply chains and manufacturing systems is to control inventory costs at different locations throughout the system while satisfying an end-customer service-level requirement. The challenge involved is to solve a nonlinear constrained optimization problem that captures the key dynamics of a complex production-inventory system. In this paper, we first develo...

Collaboration has been recognized as a significant process that holds the value creation opportunity in supply chain management. Evaluating the value of collaboration is thus necessary for developing the effective collaboration mechanisms. This paper presents the evaluation approach specifically focusing on the supply-side collaboration on inventory decisions between a supplier and a distributo...