Coordination of replenishment activities†

SUMMARY

Extensive research on the Economic Lot Scheduling Problem (ELSP), and on related topics, has produced powerful techniques originally designed to solve quite specific (coordination) problems. This paper emphasizes the omni-presence of coordination issues in multi-item inventories, characterizes them as problems of staggering and/or clustering replenishment activities or events, and shows how ELSP techniques combine to form a pertinent and fairly comprehensive methodology. A numerical example illustrates the use of one particularly powerful tool (powers of two) in stabilizing replenishment workloads.

Notes

† Paper presented at the Fifth International Symposium on Inventories, Budapest, 22-26 August 1988 (ISIR).