Field inventory management commonly known as inventory management is the function of understanding the stock mix of a company and the different demands on that stock. The demands are influenced by both external and internal factors and are balanced by the creation of purchase order requests to keep supplies at a reasonable or prescribed level. Inventory management is important for every other business enterprise. Retail supply chain Inventory management in the retail supply chain follows the following sequence:

Request for new stock from stores to head office,

Head office issues purchase orders to the vendor,

Vendor ships the goods,

Warehouse receives the goods,

Warehouse stores and distributes to the stores,

Shops and/or consumers (e.g. wholesale shops) receive the goods,

Goods are sold to customers at the shops.

Software applications SaaS inventory management software is a tool to help efficiently manage stock. While the capabilities of applications

Inventory Management with Working Capital Restrictions

Cristopher Ariel Zeballos Avila

Working capital restrictions can have disruptive effects on the coordination of the operations and finances of a company. Working capital restrictions may limit the inventory ordering power, reduce revenues, and increase the use of high premium debt. It may restrict the use of marketing and dynamic pricing decisions intended to smooth the variations of demand and revenues that result from the stochastic nature of the product life cycle. Given working capital’s multiplex composition and cost structure, its study requires careful assumptions to adequately capture its effects on the operational and financial sides. For this dissertation, we develop three models that explicitly take into account working capital restrictions. For the first research project, we build on a single-product finite-horizon periodic-review inventory management setting and include key financial aspects such as working capital constraints, payment delays and multiple sources of financing. While the Modigliani and Miller’s irrelevance principle establishes that the financial choices of a firm do not play a role in its valuation, our exploratory study examines the robustness of this result in a richer setting which intrinsically departs from their assumptions. Our numerical experiments show that when short-term debt as such becomes prohibitive or when downstream payment delays increase, the required working capital inflates rapidly. For the second research project, we study how a company should combine its inventory, product launch and marketing decisions to coordinate the operations and finances of a product portfolio that is working capital constrained. Our results show that the product portfolio benefits greatly from the joint management, reducing the amount of working capital required per product, and increasing the benefits per allocated working capital. For the last research project, we study how a company should combine its inventory, product launch and dynamic pricing decisions to coordinate the operations and finances of a product portfolio that is working capital constrained. We find that optimal product launch and pricing decisions help avoid simultaneous peak demands and simultaneous product launches. However, we find that working capital constraints can have strong negative effects on profits and may force not to launch a product in the worst cases.

EPFL2013

Carbon footprint and responsiveness trade-offs in supply chain network design

Joana Maria Comas Marti, Ralf Seifert, Jean-Sébastien Tancrez

Concern related to sustainability and greenhouse gases has grown among citizens as well as firms, which are increasingly committing to carbon emission reduction targets. However, firms' emissions come from direct and indirect sources, and from the different stages of their supply chain. Therefore, comprehensive supply chain approaches are essential to ensure the cost-effectiveness of carbon management strategies. These approaches should capture operational and environmental trade-offs arising from the interaction between different supply chain processes such as procurement, manufacturing, transport and inventory management. Considering all these processes, we propose a model for supply chain network design that takes demand uncertainty into account and includes decisions on supply chain responsiveness under different carbon policies: caps on supply chain carbon footprints, caps on market carbon footprints, and carbon taxes. Our model supports the analysis of the effect of different policies on costs and optimal network configuration and allows us to distinguish between different product types: functional or innovative products. With detailed numerical examples, we illustrate the type of analysis and managerial insights that can be derived with our model, which include the assessment of supply chains' potential for carbon abatement, the study of the effect of different carbon policies on supply chain costs and network design, the analysis of the impact of various product characteristics, the test of an alternative profit maximisation model, and the determination of the value of a supply chain carbon tax that should induce specific levels of carbon abatement. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

2015

Inventory Management with Working Capital Restrictions

Cristopher Ariel Zeballos Avila

EPFL2013