Product perishability is a major concern of certain industrial sectors, especially the agro-food industry. This paper investigates the effect of product perishability and retailers’ stockout policy on system total cost, net profit, service level, and average inventory level in a two-echelon inventory–distribution system, and develops an approximate inventory model to these system performance me...

We consider the inventory transshipment problem between two retailers that sell the same product to two independent markets. One assumption that distinguishes our work is that unsatisfied customers may also switch to the retailer with surplus inventory. We examine the impact of such customer switching behavior on firms' inventory decisions and profits. We identify situations when the firm with ...

Traditional supply chain inventory modes with trade credit usually only assumed that the up-stream suppliers offered the down-stream retailers a fixed credit period. However, in practice the retailers will also provide a credit period to customers to promote the market competition. In this paper, we formulate an optimal supply chain inventory model under two levels of trade credit policy with d...

Campbell Soup’s Continuous Replenishment (CR) program is a novel innovation designed to improve the e¢ciency of inventory management throughout the supply chain. With CR: (1) retailers pay a constant wholesale price but continue to participate in consumer promotions; (2) retailers transmit to the supplier daily inventory information, via Electronic Data Interchange (EDI); and (3) the supplier a...

In this paper, we study a logistics network design problem with vendor managed inventory in which the company is in charge of managing inventory for its downstream warehouses and retailers, and can choose whether to satisfy each retailer’s demand. The problem incorporates the location, transportation, pricing, and warehouse-retailer echelon inventory replenishment decisions. Traditionally, thes...

This paper studies a single-product supply chain, in which the supplier needs to manage its own inventory to fulfill requests from a set of heterogonous retailers. The retailers’ requests are determined by the supplier in a fashion of vendor-managed inventory (VMI). Under a VMI arrangement, the supplier agrees to pay all the order setup costs and a portion of unit holding costs for the retailer...

R etailers have invested, and continue to invest, suhstantial amounts of money in information technology (fT). By some estimates,' U.S. retailers now spend close to $30 billion a year on fT, mostly to track merchandise and operations, automate transactions, and optimize inventory levels and other supply chain decisions. However, operational execution—a vital complement to planning and automatio...

Information sharing is an important component of cooperation in supply chain management. This paper presents a study to evaluate the impact of information sharing on inventory and expected cost in a two-level supply chain with multiple retailers. Three levels of information sharing are given and the optimal inventory policy under each level is derived. We show that both the inventory level and ...

It mainly focuses the consumer strategy behavior effect on retailers pricing mechanism. Under the condition of uncertainty demand, consumers’ strategy behavior influence to price and profit. By introducing a discount factor, considering inventory timely complement and fixed inventory in two cases, obtains purchase decision and dynamic pricing strategies of consumers.

We study a multi-echelon joint inventory-location model that simultaneously determines the location of warehouses and inventory policies at the warehouses and retailers. The model is formulated as a nonlinear mixed-integer program, and is solved using a Lagrangian relaxation-based approach. The efficiency of the algorithm and benefits of integration are evaluated through a computational study.