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This paper studies inventory and pricing policies in a non-cooperative supply chain with one supplier and several retailers who are involved in producing, delivering and selling a single product. We consider inventory policies in an information-asymmetric vendor managed inventory. The study consists of different scenarios where a supplier produces the product at the wholesale price to multiple retailers. The retailers also distribute the product in dispersed and independent markets at retail selling prices. The demand rate for each market is a non- decreasing concave function of the marketing expenditures of both local retailers and the manufacturer, but a non-increasing and convex function... 

In this article, we design a revenue-sharing contract to coordinate inventory control decisions in a serial supply chain consisting of one supplier, one vendor, and one retailer. We assume that the retailer faces Poisson demand and his unsatisfied demands will be lost. The retailer applies one-for-one period policy in which he constantly places an order for one unit of product to the vendor in a predetermined time interval which results in a deterministic demand for the vendor. Vendor orders the required quantity from supplier which will be immediately received at the vendor’s warehouse. Solution procedures are developed to find the equilibrium in the vendor managed inventory program with a... 

In this paper, we design a revenue sharing contract to coordinate pricing and inventory control decisions in a serial supply chain consisting of one supplier, one manufacturer and one retailer. We assume that the retailer faces Poisson demand and his unsatisfied demands will be lost. The retailer applies one-for-one period policy in which he constantly places an order for one unit of product to the manufacturer in a predetermined time interval which results in a deterministic demand for the manufacturer. Solution procedures are developed to find the equilibrium in the Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) program with a revenue sharing contract, in which no party is willing to deviate from for the... 

The aim of this paper is to investigate the vendor managed inventory (VMI) problem of a single-vendor single-buyer supply chain system, in which the vendor is responsible to manage the buyer's inventory. To include an extended applicability in real-world environments, the multiproduct economic production quantity model with backordering under three constraints of storage capacity, number of orders, and available budget is considered. The nonlinear programming model of the problem is first developed to determine the near optimal order quantities along with the maximum backorder levels of the products in a cycle such that the total VMI inventory cost of the system is minimized. Then, a genetic... 

Nowadays, inventory management plays a crucial role in manufacturing supply chains. Vendor-managed inventory (VMI) program is a collaborative initiative that shows considerable performances in managing inventories through the supply system. In this study, we discuss the VMI initiative in a serial manufacturing supply chain when there is an uncertainty in demand and provide an approximate closed-form formula for the economic lot size. In this paper, we consider a two-echelon supply chain system consisting of a manufacturer and a retailer. Under vendor-managed inventory program with centralized decision making, the manufacturer is authorized to manage inventories of all agreed upon stock... 

This paper presents a bi-objective VMI problem in a single manufacturer-single vendor multi-retailer (SM-SV-MR) supply chain, which a redundancy allocation problem is incorporated. In the hybridized problem, a manufacturer produces a single item using several machines that work in series, and stores it in a warehouse to replenish one vendor who delivers it to several retailers using the shortest possible route. A novel meta-heuristic, called hybrid bat algorithm (HBA), with calibrated parameters is utilized to find a near-optimum solution. To show the efficiency of HBA, the results are compared to the ones using the traditional BA and a genetic algorithm  

Simultaneous reductions in inventory of raw materials, work-in-process, and finished items have recently become a major focus in supply chain management. Vendor-managed inventory is a well-known practice in supply chain collaborations, in which manufacturer manages inventory at the retailer and decides about the time and replenishment. In this paper, an integrated vendor-managed inventory model is presented for a two-level supply chain structured as a single capacitated manufacturer at the first level and multiple retailers at the second level. Manufacturer produces different products where demands are assumed decreasing functions of retail prices. In this chain, both the manufacturer and... 

The vendor-managed inventory (VMI) is a common policy in supply chain management (SCM) to reduce bullwhip effects. Although different applications of VMI have been proposed in the literature, the multi-vendor multi-retailer single-warehouse (MV-MR-SW) case has not been investigated yet. This paper develops a constrained MV-MR-SW supply chain, in which both the space and the annual number of orders of the central warehouse are limited. The goal is to find the order quantities along with the number of shipments received by retailers and vendors such that the total inventory cost of the chain is minimized. Since the problem is formulated into an integer nonlinear programming model, the... 

Recent researches have shown the importance of improving the supply chain competitiveness by means of strategic alliances. This study considers the retailer-supplier partnership through a vendor-managed inventory (VMI) system and develops an analytical model to explore the effect of important supply chain parameters on the cost savings realized from collaborative initiatives. This model is developed for a two-level supply chain consisting of a single supplier and a single retailer and examines the inventory management practices before and after implementation of VMI. The results of analytical examination show that VMI implementation in economic order quantity model when shortage is... 

Supply Chain (SC) coordination, quality requirements, and environmental issues are the main areas of interest within the field of inventory management. Few studies have integrated these concepts into an inventory problem despite its overwhelming necessity. In this direction, this paper deals with a vendor-buyer SC under the Vendor-Managed Inventory with Consignment Stock (VMI-CS) agreement. According to the agreement, the vendor bears the buyer's financial holding cost in return for the storage of products in the buyer's warehouse. Further, each shipment involves a random fraction of repairable items, which need to be withdrawn from the inventory system. Unlike the existing literature, when... 

In this study, a two-echelon single-vendor supply chain is selected to do a cost-based comparison between short-term performances of a Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) and a Retailer Managed Inventory (RMI). While the inventory costs include ordering and storing expenses, the rate of consumption and the price of goods are constant, the rate of production and pace of transportation are infinite and shortage is not allowed. This paper, after a comprehensive literature review, is followed by three cases of single retailer, n-retailer and two-retailer chains. Unlike the second case, in the first case, VMI shows an absolute superiority to RMI, and this is the reason for devising the third case in... 

In this research, a bi-objective vendor managed inventory model in a supply chain with one vendor (producer) and several retailers is developed, in which determination of the optimal numbers of different machines that work in series to produce a single item is considered. While the demand rates of the retailers are deterministic and known, the constraints are the total budget, required storage space, vendor's total replenishment frequencies, and average inventory. In addition to production and holding costs of the vendor along with the ordering and holding costs of the retailers, the transportation cost of delivering the item to the retailers is also considered in the total chain cost. The... 

This paper presents a bi-objective vendor managed inventory (BOVMI) model for a supply chain problem with a single vendor and multiple retailers, in which the demand is fuzzy and the vendor manages the retailers' inventory in a central warehouse. The vendor confronts two constraints: number of orders and available budget. In this model, the fuzzy demand is formulated using trapezoidal fuzzy number (TrFN) where the centroid defuzzification method is employed to defuzzify fuzzy output functions. Minimizing both the total inventory cost and the warehouse space are the two objectives of the model. Since the proposed model is formulated into a bi-objective integer nonlinear programming (INLP)...