Inventory or material balance control is an important part of process control. In the literature, many rules have been proposed to held in designing such systems, but their justification is often unclear. The main contribution of this paper is to proposed the more general selfconsistency rule for evaluating inventory control systems. Consistency means that the steadystate mass balances (total, ...

A decades of offshoring production across the world, companies are rethinking their global networks. Local sourcing is receiving more attention, but it remains challenging to balance the offshore sourcing cost advantage against the increased inventories, because of its longer lead time, and against the cost and (volume) flexibility of each source’s capacity. To guide strategic allocation in thi...

This paper considers the impact of random machine breakdowns on the classical Economic Production Quantity (EPQ) model for a product subject to exponential decay and under a no-resumption (NR) inventory control policy. A product is manufactured in batches on a machine that is subject to random breakdowns in order to meet a constant demand over an infinite planning horizon. The product is assume...

We examine inventory adjustment in the U.S. manufacturing sector using quarterly rmlevel data over the period 1978{97. Our evidence indicates that the inventory investment process is nonlinear and asymmetric, results consistent with a nonconvex adjustment cost structure. The inventory adjustment process di ers over the business cycle: for a given level of excess inventories, rms disinvest more ...

We consider an inventory control problem where it is possible to collect some imperfect information on future demand. We refer to such information as imperfect Advance Demand Information (ADI), which may occur in different forms of applications. A simple example is a company that uses sales representatives to market its products, in which case the collection of sales representatives’ informatio...

ith the growing proliferation of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, including among midsize companies, it becomes critical to address why and under what circumstances one can realize the benefits of an ERP system. In contrast to previous research, this study examines how managers (president, CFO, production VP, etc.) assess ERP success in specific modules (e.g., suppliers and purchase ...

We present two integrated network design and inventory control problems in service-parts logistics systems. Such models are complicated due to demand uncertainty and highly nonlinear time-based service level constraints. Exploiting unique properties of the nonlinear constraints, we provide an equivalent linear formulation under part-warehouse service requirements, and an approximate linear form...