Optimal replenishment and sales team initiatives for pharmaceutical products – A mathematical model

AbstractThe paper addresses an inventory model of pharmaceutical products where the demand rate of the customers increases with the volume of the initiatives of the sales team. In this model, the deterioration of the product varies depending on on-hand inventory. The volume of sales team initiatives is a control variable. It is dependent on on-hand inventory and vice versa. The profit function of the farm is formulated by the trading of inventory costs, purchasing costs, losses due to deterioration and sales team initiative costs, considering inflation and the time value of the monetary cost and profit parameters. Finally, the profit function is maximized by a variation of the calculus method. A numerical example is given to justify our model

Trade Credit Policies for Supplier, Manufacturer, and Retailer: An Imperfect Production-Inventory System with Rework

In this study, we developed a trade credit policy for a three-layer supply chain consisting of a supplier, a manufacturer and a retailer. We propose an optimal production rate and selling price for the manufacturer and the retailer under an imperfect production system. The suggested coordination policy optimizes the profit of each supply chain member. Two models were formulated for two real-life strategies respectively. The first one is a collaborative (integrated) system and the second one is a Stackelberg leadership system. Both strategies were analyzed for various credit periods, respectively offered by the supplier to the manufacturer, by the manufacturer to the retailer, and by the retailer to the customers, by considering price-sensitive demand and a certain replenishment rate. Finally, we concluded which strategy will be better for inventory management under the given restrictions in the form of propositions. The concavity property for the net profit function was established with respect to the selling price and the production rate, which was also described graphically and analyzed by numerical examples

A Two-Warehouse Model for Deteriorating Items with Holding Cost under Particle Swarm Optimization

A deterministic inventory model has been developed for deteriorating items and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) having a ramp type demands with the effects of inflation with two-warehouse facilities. The owned warehouse (OW) has a fixed capacity of W units; the rented warehouse (RW) has unlimited capacity. Here, we assumed that the inventory holding cost in RW is higher than those in OW. Shortages in inventory are allowed and partially backlogged and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) it is assumed that the inventory deteriorates over time at a variable deterioration rate. The effect of inflation has also been considered for various costs associated with the inventory system and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Numerical example is also used to study the behaviour of the model. Cost minimization technique is used to get the expressions for total cost and other parameters

An integrated pricing and deteriorating model and a hybrid algorithm for a VMI (vendor-managed-inventory) supply chain

This paper studies a vendor-managed-inventory (VMI) supply chain where a manufacturer, as a vendor, procures a type of nondeteriorating raw material to produce a deteriorating product, and distribute it to multiple retailers. The price of the product offered by one retailer is also influenced by the prices offered by other retailers because consumers can choose the product from any of the retailers. This paper is one of the first papers that propose an integrated model to study the influence of pricing and deterioration on the profit of such a VMI system. A hybrid approach combining genetic algorithms and an analytical method is developed for efficiently determining the optimal price of the product of each retailer, the inventory policies of the product and the raw material. Our results of a detailed numerical study show that parameters related to the market and deterioration have significant influences on the profit of the VMI system. However, different from common intuition, we find that an increase in the substitution elasticity of the product among different retailers can bring an increase in the retail prices of the product, while the increase of the market scale can reduce the retail prices. © 2011 IEEE.published_or_final_versio