Central versus local multiple stage inventory planning: An analysis of solutions

Supply chain management refers to the integration of all activities associated with moving goods from raw material stages through to end users. Yet this system-wide vision of inventory planning often requires the coordination of several commercially independent entities, such as suppliers, manufacturers and distributors. This study explores the issue of friction between replenishment policies, defined as the disparity between centrally and locally planned solutions to 98,820 deterministic, multiple stage inventory planning problems modeling systems of varying levels of complexity. Friction is found to be strongly related to certain cost factors, suggesting that certain supply chains could be more vulnerable to tension and inefficiencies when replenishment policies are derived without cooperation between commercially independent yet logistically interdependent stages. These results can also be applied to identify relationships between the findings of otherwise seemingly disparate previous studies of coordination schemes for supply chain partners.