This paper examines the impact of customer order sizes on a make-to-stock system with multiple demand classes. We first characterize the manufacturer's optimal production and rationing policies when the demand is nonunitary and lost if unsatisfied. We also investigate the optimal policies of a backorder system with two demand classes and fixed order sizes. Through a numerical study, we show the effects of batch orders on the manufacturer's inventory cost as well as on the benefit of optimal stock rationing. It is shown that batch ordering may reduce the manufacturer's overall cost if carefully introduced in a first-come-first-served (FCFS) system. With the same effective demand rates, the customers' order sizes also have a strong impact on the benefit of optimal stock rationing.Subject classifications: batch ordering; make-to-stock; stock rationing.
We consider a supply chain consisting of one manufacturer (capacitated supplier) and two retailers. We characterize the manufacturer’s optimal production policy under selective-information sharing, in which the manufacturer receives demand and inventory information from only one of the two retailers. We show that the manufacturer’s optimal production policy is a state-dependent base-stock policy and that the base-stock levels have a monotonic structure. We also perform an extensive numerical study to examine how system factors affect the benefit of information sharing and the relative values of information from each retailer. In addition, we identify cases where the cost saving due to receiving information from only one retailer captures most of the saving that can be obtained when the information is received from both retailers. Finally, we investigate the cost effectiveness of echelon-stock policies in systems with full-information sharing and introduce the “information pooling effect” as well as economies of scale with respect to information sharing.
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