Automobile manufacturers in the U.S. supply chain exhibit significant differences in their days of supply of finished vehicles (average inventory divided by average daily sales rate). For example, from 1995 to 2004, Toyota consistently carried approximately 30 fewer days of supply than General...

Dell's supply chain for desktops involves Asian vendors shipping components by sea to several U.S. plants. Although suppliers are responsible for shipping enough inventory to meet total needs across all production sites, Dell can reroute and expedite their shipments while in transit, and also...

Batch (wave) release policies are prevalent in warehouses with an automated sorter, and take different forms depending on how batches released consecutively may overlap downstream in the sorter. Continuous (waveless) release constitutes an emerging alternative recently adopted by several firms....

It is well known that a one-step scoring estimator that starts from any N^{1/2}-consistent estimator has the same first-order asymptotic efficiency as the maximum likelihood estimator. This paper extends this result to k-step estimators and test statistics for k = 1, higher-order asymptotic...

Inventory models customarily assume that demand is fully satisfied if sufficient stock is available. We analyze the form of the optimal inventory policy if the inventory manager can choose to meet a fraction of the demand. Under classical conditions we show that the optimal policy is again of...

This study is based on the analogy between hedging a risky asset and keeping reserves to meet an unknown demand. The optimal hedging level, which depends on individual preferences, is regarded as a measure of risk. We determine the set of optimal levels and investigate the properties of the...

In this paper, the choice between different freight transportation modes is analyzed from the viewpoint of a shipper/receiver. The analysis is based on the concept of total logistics costs. This means that, when comparing different transportation modes, not only the cost of transportation itself...

This paper is concerned with the ways in which theoretical decision models fail to meet the needs of practical decision-making. To illustrate the arguments theoretical approaches to the well-known newsboy problem are briefly examined. An alternative applied approach is described to further...