A broad product assortment is usually valued highly by customers. However, holding a great number of product variants in inventory increases the costs of a supplier. It is possible to reduce need for warehousing with direct deliveries from manufacturing units, but customer value is reduced when...

Information sharing practices such as vendor‐managed inventory (VMI) give manufacturers access to more accurate demand information, e.g. customer sales data, than before. The value of this type of information sharing has been established in many studies. However, most of the research has...

The paper shows that it is possible to reconstruct the dynamical attractors of demand at different levels of the supply chain by using time series duplication and techniques for normalisation. The objective of reconstructing dynamical attractors is to learn more about the long‐term dynamical...

A particular problem for European suppliers to the grocery trade is the requirement for country or region specific product variants. A large number of local variants dramatically reduces the supply chain performance of a European supplier in the smaller markets. Focuses on the issue of product...