OBJECTIVE To characterize the impact of widespread inventory management policies on stock-outs of essential drugs in Zambia's health clinics and develop related recommendations. METHODS Daily clinic storeroom stock levels of artemether-lumefantrine (AL) products in 2009-2010 were captured in 145 facilities through photography and manual transcription of paper forms, then used to determine his...

Computer-driven displays have long been thought to help decision making. But the justification for using these devices in decision-making has been long on intuition and short on quantitative analysis. To see if this intuition was right, we conducted an experiment. Eighteen interested and experienced decision-makers in the inventory control field met for twenty class hours of instruction in adva...

Inventory control policies have been recognized as a contributory factor to the bullwhip effect and inventory instability. Previous studies have indicated that there is a trade-off between bullwhip effect and inventory performance where the bullwhip effect reduction might increase inventory instability. Therefore, there is a need for inventory control policies that can cope with supply chain dy...

Available online 28 August 2014 In today's era of globalization, periodically new products with better value and added features are introduced into themarket. The rapid technological breakthroughs are creating significant risks of obsolescence at the product level. It creates enormous challenges to coordinate between technologymanagement and inventory control policies. Due to the dynamic nature...

generally ordering policies are done by two methods, including fix order quantity (foq) and fix order period (fop). these methods are static and either the quantity of ordering or the procedure of ordering is fixing in throughout time horizon. in real environments, demand is varying in any period and may be considered as uncertainty. when demand is variable in any period, the traditional and st...

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...

This paper is concerned with the coordination of inventory control in divergent multiechelon inventory systems under periodic review and decentralized control. All the installations track echelon inventories. Under decentralized control the installations will decide upon replenishment policies that minimize their individual inventory costs. In general these policies do not coincide with the opt...

Practical experience and scientific research show that there is scope for improving the performance of inventory control systems by delaying a replenishment order that is otherwise triggered by generalised and all too often inappropriate assumptions. This paper presents the first analysis of the most commonly used continuous (s, S) policies with delayed ordering for inventory systems with compo...