doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2006.05.026
Copyright © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Production, Manufacturing and Logistics
Central versus local multiple stage inventory planning: An analysis of solutions
N.C. Simpson
, a, 
aDepartment of Operations Management and Strategy, 351 Jacobs Management Center, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-4000, United States
Received 3 May 2004;
accepted 8 May 2006.
Available online 21 July 2006.
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Abstract
Supply chain management refers to the integration of all activities associated with moving goods from raw material stages through to end users. Yet this system-wide vision of inventory planning often requires the coordination of several commercially independent entities, such as suppliers, manufacturers and distributors. This study explores the issue of friction between replenishment policies, defined as the disparity between centrally and locally planned solutions to 98,820 deterministic, multiple stage inventory planning problems modeling systems of varying levels of complexity. Friction is found to be strongly related to certain cost factors, suggesting that certain supply chains could be more vulnerable to tension and inefficiencies when replenishment policies are derived without cooperation between commercially independent yet logistically interdependent stages. These results can also be applied to identify relationships between the findings of otherwise seemingly disparate previous studies of coordination schemes for supply chain partners.
Keywords: Supply chain management; Inventory; Production; Coordination
Fig. 1. The product structure of the 14-stage, generalized structure test bed.
Fig. 2. Link friction for each level of S1 and D in the two-stage, single link test bed.
Fig. 3. The interaction of link friction and the ratio S1/D for the two-stage, single link test bed (n = 12,960).
Fig. 4. The interaction of link friction and the ratio S1/D for the two-stage, single link test bed, plotted by various levels of holding cost factor e.
Fig. 5. The interaction of link friction and the fixed replenishment cost S1 for the two-stage, single link test bed, plotted by various levels of experimental factor p.
Fig. 6. The interaction of estimated friction and factor EOI2 for the four-stage, serial structure test bed, plotted by demand pattern set.
Fig. 7. The interaction of estimated friction and holding cost factor e for the four-stage, serial structure test bed, plotted by demand pattern set.
Fig. 8. The interaction of estimated friction and factor EOI2 for the 14-stage, generalized structure test bed, plotted by demand pattern set.
Fig. 9. The interaction of estimated friction and holding cost factor e for the 14-stage, generalized structure test bed, plotted by demand pattern set.
Table 1.
Solutions to example two-stage problem

Table 2.
Friction associated with the two-stage, single link test bed, n = 12,960 experiments

Table 3.
Estimated friction associated with the four-stage, serial structure test bed, n = 81,000 experiments

Table 4.
Estimated friction associated with the 14-stage, generalized structure test bed, n = 4860 experiments
