This dissertation explores coordination schemes that can be used to align the incentives of an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and its contract manufacturer (CM). The coordination ismediated by demand forecast sharing and component overage risk sharing. Three major problems are studied:...

A pre-pack is a collection of items used in retail distribution. By grouping multiple units of one or more stock keeping units (SKU), distribution and handling costs can be reduced; however, ordering flexibility at the retail outlet is limited. This paper studies an inventory system at a retail...

We present an approach to forecast customer orders of ready-to-launch new products that are similar to past products. The approach fits product life cycle (PLC) curves to historical customer order data, clusters the curves of similar products, and uses the representative curve of the new...

Many retailers are reducing store footprint and downsizing their assortments accordingly to improve store productivity. Some of the revenue for items removed from the assortment may be recouped by substitution, but also some of the revenue for items kept in the assortment may be lost due to...

We study sourcing behavior in “severe” conditions where supply disruptions are rare, but carry the potential of wiping out several periods' worth of a firm's profit. The trade-off between scale economies from supplier consolidation and risk mitigation from supplier diversification is at the...

In practice, lead time demand (LTD) can be non-standard: skewed, multi-modal or highly variable; factors that compromise the validity of the classic approaches for setting safety stock levels. Motivated by encountering this problem at our industry partner, we develop an approach for setting...

We provide and describe a data set of N=8935 weekly, normalized customer orders over the entire product life cycle for 170 Dell computer products sold in North America over a three and a half year period, from 2013-2016. Total orders for these products exceeded 4 million units and well over a...

When multiple retailers hold inventory to satisfy random demand, retailer inventory-sharing strategies can potentially reduce the demand-supply mismatch and increase overall supply chain performance. In this paper, we experimentally investigate alternative inventory-sharing strategies in a...

Retailers often use service level agreements (SLAs) to evaluate their supplier's performance. Based on an examination of 70 SLAs from practice we conclude that in terms of evaluating fill rate, these SLAs vary in at least three key dimensions: (1) supplier performance can be evaluated for each...