ABSTRACT
Supply chains exist in almost every industry, and the complexity of the chain may vary from industry to industry and rm to rm. An organization may have many supply chains operational within its various departments or it could itself be part of a larger supply chain (or both). The major drivers of any supply chain’s performance are facilities, inventory, transportation, information, sourcing, and pricing (Chopra and Meindl 2007). Inventory exists at every stage of the supply chain as either raw material or semi-nished/nished goods. Inventory stored at different points of the supply chain has a different impact on the supply chain’s costs and performance. One of the important issues in supply chain management (SCM) is to decide on the inventory to maintain at different stages in the chain so that the supply chain can achieve the desired levels of responsiveness and efciency. To achieve this, rms use inventory-control policies or order policies and, for the problem in this work, we assume a periodic review (R), order-up-to (S) policy, that is, a (R, S) policy, at every installation.
