Companies undertaking operations improvement in supply chains face many alternatives. This work seeks to assist practitioners to prioritize improvement actions by developing analytical expressions for the marginal values of three parameters – (i) lead time mean, (ii) lead time variance, and...

This paper evaluates the benefit of a strategy of sharing shipment information, where one stage in a supply chain shares shipment quantity information with its immediate downstream customers--a practice also known as advanced shipping notice. Under a periodic review inventory policy, one...

The relationship between supply chain/operations practice and operational/financial performance has been of interest to academics and practitioners for many years. We propose and develop a model exploring these connections, utilising data from a survey of 72 furniture manufacturers located...

Motivated by a problem facing a large retailer, we consider the impact of pack size on the performance of a periodic review inventory system in the presence of spatial (i.e., between retailers) correlation of demand--which we model using an equicorrelated multivariate Poisson distribution....

We review inventories in mainland China by evaluating the trajectory of aggregate inventories in recent decades, and then modelling the relationship of inventories in some 300,000 manufacturers with respect to volume (using cost of goods sold), industry (using SIC codes), and geographical...

The periodic review inventory system is not only pervasive, but also has an extensive literature dealing with various aspects, from its theoretical underpinnings through to its performance. However, the selection of the best review period and its behaviour with respect to basic inventory...