This paper investigates the impact of a vendor managed inventory (VMI) strategy upon transportation operations in a supply chain. Specifically, the issue of batching to enable better use of transport vehicles is studied. A system dynamics methodology is used to develop difference equation models of three scenarios–– traditional, internal consolidation and VMI. The holistic nature of inventory m...

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...

The bullwhip effect means that demand variability increases as one moves up the supply chain. In the following article the bullwhip effect is quantified for each part of the supply chain which is presupposed to consist of a producer, a wholesaler, a retailer, and a consumer. After considering the causes of the bullwhip effect, it will be shown with the help of a nonlinear optimization model to ...

1. Introduction In recent years, supply chain technologies and processes (vendor managed inventory (VMI), continuous replenishment (CR), electronic data interchange (EDI), etc.) have become strategic imperatives for firms in increasingly competitive industries (Williams and Frolick 2001). Extensive research has examined the performance outcomes from these supply chain initiatives. For example, ...

In a VMI service, a central production center (i.e. the vendor) can control the inventory of each retailer according to the optimization of the costs due both to the overfilling/stock-out of the inventories and to the travels required for the deliveries. In this work, an original mathematical programming approach has been formulated and implemented in order to show that under specific but commo...

In this research, we deal with VMI (Vendor Managed Inventory) problem where one supplier is responsible for managing a retailer’s inventory under unstable customer demand situation. To cope with the nonstationary demand situation, we develop a retrospective action-reward learning model, a kind of reinforcement learning techniques, which is faster in learning than conventional action-reward lear...

This paper discusses how a vendor manages multiple products within its multiple non-identical retailers operating under a vendor managed inventory (VMI) contract that allows unequal shipment frequencies to the retailers. The vendor replenishment cycle for each product is taken to be an integer multiple of the retailer replenishment cycle where vendor is penalized for exceeding the upper stock l...