A multiechelon inventory model with fixed replenishment intervals
Management Science
Information distortion in a supply chain: the bullwhip effect
Management Science - Special issue on frontier research in manufacturing and logistics
Value of Information in Capacitated Supply Chains
Management Science
Managing Supply Chain Demand Variability with Scheduled Ordering Policies
Management Science
The Quantity Flexibility Contract and Supplier-Customer Incentives
Management Science
A Capacitated Production-Inventory Model with Periodic Demand
Operations Research
The Value of Information Sharing in a Two-Level Supply Chain
Management Science
A Time-Series Framework for Supply-Chain Inventory Management
Operations Research
Transshipment and Its Impact on Supply Chain Members' Performance
Management Science
Analysis of a Decentralized Supply Chain Under Partial Cooperation
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Competition, Cooperation, and Information Sharing in a Two-Echelon Assembly System
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Optimal Policies for a Capacitated Two-Echelon Inventory System
Operations Research
An efficient heuristic for inventory control when the customer is using a (s,S) policy
Operations Research Letters
Headquarter-centered common sourcing management through order coordination and consolidation
Computers and Operations Research
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We study a supply chain with one supplier and many retailers that face exogenous end-customer demands. The supplier and the retailers all try to minimize their own inventory-related costs. In contrast to the retailers' newsvendor-type ordering behavior (under which retailers may place orders freely in every period), we propose two scheduled ordering policies: the scheduled balanced ordering policy (SBOP) and the scheduled synchronized ordering policy (SSOP). Under both the SBOP and SSOP, retailers are allowed to order freely only in one period of an ordering cycle, and receive fixed shipments in other periods. Retailers take turns to order freely under the SBOP, while under the SSOP all retailers order freely in the same period. With the average supply chain cost per period as the performance measure, we identify mathematical conditions under which scheduled ordering policies outperform the newsvendor-type ordering. Through a large-scale numerical study, we find that scheduled ordering policies are most effective when (i) the supplier's holding and expediting costs are high and the retailer's backorder cost is small, (ii) the end-customer demand variance and correlation are high, and (iii) the supplier's capacity is high. In addition, we observe that the behavior of the SSOP often complements that of the SBOP. Whereas the SBOP is better than SSOP when the supplier's capacity is low and when the end-customer demand correlation level is high, the SSOP is better when the opposite conditions prevail.