The Inventory Competitive Product's Supply Chain Management Under VMI

Maximizing channel profits while providing satisfactory services is the main objective of supply chain management(SCM).Some systemized means and technologies are used necessarily to achieve it.Thus people either in business practice or in academic research are always interested in integrating the different parts of a supply chain into a coordinated system.Since 80' s of last century,information technology has been rapidly developed. Supported by powerful IT,vendor-managed inventory(VMI) emerged and became popular in many industries and market sectors as a new inventory control means, which is based on an essential managerial idea that members of a supply chain share the information,and upstream firms are given the responsibility of managing the entire channel inventory and respond quickly to the demand of downstream firms and customers.Along with the VMI's successes in being applied widely in business practices,a few of SCM literatures on it have investigated the nature and efficience of VMI from different angles and made some valuable conclusions.Based on these researches,this dissertation substantially focuses on the SCM problems under VMI of a kind of product in the market whose demand is dependent on the inventory level,we call it the inventory competitive product(ICP).The main content of this dissertation is composed of two parts:1) The ICP' s static FMI supply chain contract models,which are discussed in Chapter 4 and 5,concerning the VMI wholesale price and revenue sharing contract respectively.For the ICP,compared with the traditional RMI~+ system,the VMI wholesale price contract has more advantages in coordinating the supply chain, and both of them are likely to be the coordinated contracts under some circumstances;the VMI revenue sharing contract is appropriate to be used to manage the ICP with either narrow profit margin or high inventory elasticity;2) The supplier' s dynamic replenishment policy and the ICP' s optimal shelf space, which are the main problems analysed and resolved in Chapter 6.By a periodic review strategy,it is optimal for the supplier to follow a replenishment-up-to policy under different VMI environments,and the supplier' s multiperiod decisions for the optimal inventory levels held in the retailer's shelf space are myopic,thus the single-period optimal inventory level under VMI revenue-sharing contract can determine the optimal shelf space.The innovative works of this dissertation are summarized as follows:1) It is the first time to discuss jointly the ICP and the VMI.By modeling the ICP's supply chain under VMI,this dissertation investigates coordinated effects produced by the ICP's demand nature together with the VMI mechanism, and reveals the relative characteristics of the ICP' s SCM under VMI.2) Modeling the ICP' s VMI wholesale price contract and revenue-sharing contract. Through the relative model analysis and numerical examples,some sensitive analysis are performed concerning the effects that the various changes of relative economic parameters have on the decision variables in models,and managerial significances of the ICP' s VMI contracts are revealed.3) Based on the FKO model,considering the ICP' s demand nature,an appropriate model are built by using the dynamic programming method to determine the optimal shelf space that has never been considered in the traditional system,while verifying the optimality of supplier' s replenishment policy under VMI,which to some extent develops the FKO model.