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...

The desire to decrease logistics costs has led organizations to investigate more profitable approaches to supply chain management. Three proven, yet not fully integrated, supply chain levers are distribution network optimization, shipment consolidation, and cross-docking (Brockmann 1999). The...

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...

A program of freight consolidation is a systematic attempt to decrease total transportation cost between a given origin and destination. Fewer shipments of larger weight are dispatched, while recognizing the inventory carrying cost of holding the first-arriving orders before dispatching the...

The logistics literature reports that three different types of shipment consolidation policies are popular in current practice. These are time-based, quantity-based and Time-and-Quantity (TQ)-based consolidation policies. Although time-based and quantity-based policies have been studied via...

Different valuations of the same service can provide profit opportunities to the service provider, by differentiating premiums for varying types of customers. However, the success of revenue management in such a market environment heavily depends on the quality of the market research on customer...

Suppose that a private carrier delivers to a set of customers and also has a number of (optional) backhaul opportunities. It wants to choose the best of these, depending on the revenue generated, and insert them in a revised tour. This will be at an expense of deviation from the original tour,...

Most studies on supply chain management have taken an “inventory” point of view: The chain, supplier → manufacturer → major manufacturer, is thus analyzed as a series of production-inventory decisions. Although correct, that approach neglects issues on the transportation between nodes,...

Much has been written on the disadvantages of the Canadian system for grain transportation and handling. Although some high capacity elevators exits, there are many small elevators located on little-used branch lines. It has been difficult politically to rationalize branch lines and elevators....