Vendor-managed inventory (VMI) and consignment inventory (CI) are supply-chain sourcing practices between a vendor and customer. VMI allows the vendor to initiate orders on behalf of the customer. This presumably benefits the vendor who can then make replenishment decisions according to her own...

Firms such as Wal-Mart and Campbell's Soup have successfully implemented vendor managed inventory (VMI). Articles in the trade press and academic literature often begin with the premise that VMI is ‘beneficial'; but beneficial to which party and under what conditions? We consider in this paper...

This paper considers inventory models of the order-quantity/order-point type, or (Q,r) models. In general the control parameters (Q and r) depend on both the demand process and the replenishment lead time. Although many studies have treated lead time as constant, focusing solely on demand, a...

The processing time of large orders is, in many industries, longer than that of small orders. This renders supply lead times in such settings to be increasing in the order size. Yet that pattern is not reflected in existing inventory control models, especially those allowing for random lead...