SCA Östrand implements an expansion of its current production of pulp. Today's 435 000 tonnes will be 900 000 tonnes when the new production line is put into operation in 2018. SCA Logistics, which is responsible for the storage and transportation of pulp would therefore like to know how much area that is currently storing pulp and if the existing surface is sufficient to cope with the increase in volume from SCA Östrand. If the surface is not enough, SCA Logistics want to know how much space will be needed to cope with the increase in volume. The study is a combined case study and design methodology. Through process mapping, various scenarios are being developed to implement the current status and future analysis where the purpose of the study can be determined by calculating the maximum area, volume and fill rate. Information has been obtained from printed literature, scientific papers, previous theses, and observations of the process in SCA Logistics in the port of Tunadal. Relevant data has been obtained from an external supervisor at SCA Logistics. The study provides answers to how much space is available at present time, the fact that the current surface will not be sufficient to cope with the increase in volume and a minimum of additional 5800 m2 surface area will be needed to store pulp on. / SCA Östrand genomför i dagsläget en expansion av dess nuvarande produktion av pappersmassa. Dagens 435 000 ton kommer dubbleras när den nya produktionslinjen tas i bruk 2018. SCA Logistics som ansvarar för lagring och transportering av pappersmassan vill således veta hur mycket yta som finns i nuläget att lagra pappersmassa på och om den befintliga ytan är tillräcklig för att klara av volymökningen från SCA Östrand. Om ytan inte räcker till, vill SCA Logistics veta hur mycket yta som kommer behövas för att klara av volymökningen. Studien är en kombinerad fallstudie och designmetodik. Genom en processkartläggning kommer olika scenarion tas fram för att genomföra en nuläges-och framtidsanalys där syftet med studien kommer bestäm-mas genom att beräkna maximal area, volym och fyllnadsgrad. Inform-ation införskaffas från tryckt litteratur, vetenskapliga artiklar, tidigare examensarbeten, samt processpromenader på SCA Logistics i Tunadals-hamnen. Relevant data erhålls från extern handledare på SCA Logistics. Studien ger svar på hur mycket yta som finns tillgängligt i nuläget, att denna yta inte kommer vara tillräcklig för att klara av volymökningen och ett minimum av ytterligare 5800 m2 behövs utöver den nuvarande ytan som finns tillgänglig.

Costs related to inventory are usually a significant amount of the company’s total assets. Despite this, companies in general don’t pay a lot of interest in it, even if the benefits from effective inventory are obvious when it comes to less tied up capital, increased customer satisfaction and better working environment. Permobil AB, Timrå is in an intense period when it comes to revenue and growth. The production unit is aiming for an increased output of 30 % in the next two years. To make this possible the company has to improve their way to distribute and handle material,The purpose of the study is to provide useful information and concrete proposals for action, so that the company can build a strategy for an effective and sustainable solution when it comes to inventory management. Alternative methods for making forecasts are suggested, in order to reach a more nuanced perception of different articles, and how they should be managed. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used in order to give specially selected persons the chance to decide criteria for how the article should be valued. The criteria they agreed about were annual volume value, lead time, frequency rate and purchase price. The other method that was proposed was a two-dimensional model where annual volume value and frequency was the criteria that specified in which class an article should be placed. Both methods resulted in significant changes in comparison to the current solution. For the spare part inventory different forecast methods were tested and compared with the current solution. It turned out that the current forecast method performed worse than both moving average and exponential smoothing with trend. The small sample of ten random articles is not big enough to reject the current solution, but still the result is a reason enough, for the company to control the quality of the forecasts. / Kostnader kopplade till lagerverksamheten är ofta en betydande del av företagets totala omsättning. Trots detta är generella intresset för effektiv lagerstyrning lågt, trots dokumenterade fördelar som mindre bundet kapital, ökad kundservice och bättre arbetsmiljö. Permobil AB, Timrå är inne i en tillväxtfas och siktar på att öka sin produktion med mer än 30 % inom två år. För att möjliggöra detta behöver företaget förbättra sin lagerstyrning och utveckla sitt sätt att distribuera material, dels till eftermarknad och dels till sin egen montering. Syftet med studien är att bistå företaget i dess önskan att skapa en effektivare lagerstyrning med avseende på kvalitet och kostnad. Alternativa metoder att klassificera artiklar föreslogs, för att skapa en mer nyanserad bild av en artikels karaktär och hur den ska styras. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) användes för att ge utvalda nyckelpersoner en chans att bestämma kriterier för hur en artikel ska bedömas. Dessa kriterier var årligt volymvärde, ledtid, uttagsfrekvens och inköpspris. Den andra metoden som föreslogs var en tvådimensionell klassificering där årligt volymvärde och uttagsfrekvens delar in befintliga artiklar i nio klasser med olika prioritering. Båda metoder gav upphov till betydande förändringar i jämförelse med den nuvarande metoden. För reservdelslagret testades alternativa prognosmetoder, för att jämföra med den nuvarande. Det visade sig att de båda metoderna glidande medelvärde och exponentiell utjämning med trend presterade bättre än den befintliga metoden. Stickprovet på 10 slumpmässigt utvalda artiklar är för litet för att förkasta nuvarande sätt att prognosticera, men det finns skäl att upprätta rutiner för kvalitetskontroll för att säkra en hög nivå på framtida prognoser.

Purpose: This study aims to find how the integration between marketing and operations can improve demand management in order to have efficient inventory level and avoid excess inventory. Method used: In order to have optimize inventory level and managing demand, integrating business process between marketing, supply planning and inventory management team was considered in this study. Qualitative data from nine interviews among three direct sales cosmetics companies was gathered. Findings: Empirical findings address excess inventory is caused by several issue in the company as poor management of demand forecasting, wide product portfolio, long lead time, the lack of sharing information between the company and its suppliers and ineffective strategy to avoid excess inventory within the company. Regarding to improve forecast accuracy and manage demand, findings indicate the role of marketing in obtaining knowledge about customer insight is not good enough. Practical Implication: It is critical that works and plans from each function be integrated to optimize inventory. In order to support optimize inventory strategy all pertinent departments must continue reviewing meeting with the aim to reach a consensus about the products planning for the both side of demand and operation align with overall strategic goals of the company. Contribution: Empirical data demonstrate the best way for effective implication of demand management occurs when marketing can provide demand information in time, as well as supply chain management can react flexibly to demand changes in time. Moreover, the lack of integration between marketing and supply chain management is a major barrier in optimizing inventory.

<p>A payment scheme specifies when payments are made between firms in a supply chain. It has direct implications on how supply chain inventory is financed and managed. Longer supply chains due to globalization and the recent credit crisis have increased the pressure to make financing the supply chain more efficient. It was recently reported that 81% of UK firms say that market conditions have brought procurement and finance strategies in closer alignment. Meanwhile, information technology platform advancements provide opportunity for increased variety of payment schemes. It is therefore important to understand how different payment schemes should be captured in inventory decisions. This dissertation examines the impact of supply chain finance (the set of financial payment transactions that are triggered by supply chain events) on inventory management from both normative and behavioral perspectives. </p><p>We seek to address the following questions. From a normative perspective: How does the optimal inventory policy depend on the supply chain financing structure? What is the right inventory financing scheme for a supply chain? From a behavioral perspective: How do real managers psychologically process payments when making inventory decisions, and how are they affected by the supply chain financing scheme? The results are reported in three chapters, described below.</p><p>In the first chapter, "Payment schemes and the financed inventory," we present a model of payment schemes in an echelon supply chain. A payment scheme specifies when payments are made between firms. Standard inventory decision models make strict assumptions about the payment scheme in order to avoid explicitly tracking financial flows. These assumptions, however, often do not hold in practice. We show that these assumptions can be relaxed. In particular, we introduce a model that allows us to track the financial flow of inventory models depending on the inventory policy and the payment scheme. We also define two new measures - financed inventory and margin backorders. These new measures allow us to leverage the structure of the payment scheme to define an equivalent problem that does not have to explicitly track financial flows. We apply this method to the base stock model and economic order quantity model to demonstrate the sensitivity of the optimal inventory policy to the payment scheme. Our results provide simple closed-form formulas for inventory managers and also sheds light on what is the right payment scheme for a supply chain.</p><p>The second chapter, "The effect of payment schemes on inventory decisions: The role of mental accounting," focuses on managerial behavior: how do manager's mentally process and evaluate payments when making an inventory decision? Keeping the net profit structure constant, we study how the payment scheme affects inventory decisions in the newsvendor problem. Specifically, we examine three payment schemes which can be interpreted as the inventory order being financed 1) by the newsvendor herself, 2) by the supplier, and 3) by the customer. We find in laboratory experiments that the order quantities may be higher or lower than the expected profit-maximizing solution depending on the payment scheme. Specifically, the order quantity under newsvendor own financing is greater than that under supplier financing, which is, in turn, greater than the order quantity under customer financing. This observed behavior biases orders in the opposite direction as what a regular or hyperbolic time-discounted utility model would predict, and cannot be explained by loss aversion models. Instead, the findings are consistent with a model that underweights the order-time payments, which is consistent with the "prospective accounting" assumption in the mental accounting literature. A second study shows the results hold even if all actual payments are conducted at the same time, suggesting that the framing of the payment scheme is sufficient to induce mental accounting of payments at different times. We further validate the robustness of our model under different profit-margin conditions. Our findings contribute to the understanding of the psychological processes involved in newsvendor decisions and have implications for supply chain financing practices and supply chain contract design.</p><p>The third chapter, "Reference prices and transaction utility in inventory decisions," studies another aspect of mental accounting in inventory decisions - the phenomenon that individuals often view a price as relative to other prices when making an evaluation. We present a descriptive model of the effects of reference prices and transaction utility in a newsvendor setting. The model predicts that an individual's order is irrationally increasing in past purchasing costs, decreasing in past selling prices, and decreasing in the proportion of high profit margin to low profit margin products in the decision portfolio. Three laboratory experiments support the model's predictions. These results suggest that managerial supervision and/or intervention are most valuable after a sudden increase or decrease in the cost or price of a product, or for a product that differs significantly in profit margin from other products in the category. We further extend the study to a supply chain setting. We show analytically that the supplier's optimal wholesale price is lower when the newsvendor is subject to reference effects compared to when the newsvendor is rational, and that the supplier's optimal retail price may be higher or lower depending on whether the reference effect is stronger for the newsvendor or for customers. Finally, we show that supply chains may suffer from a behavioral inefficiency we call a behavioral price whip: an increase in the transfer price between two nodes may influence the upstream node to order more than is rational while the downstream node demands less than is rational. These results suggest that suppliers should carefully evaluate the reference effect on both customers and retailers, and that everyday low pricing has a behavioral benefit over high-low pricing.</p> / Dissertation

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / Each inventory manager at the Aviation Supply Office Philadelphia, PA is presently required to manage approximately 700 line items. To allow the inventory manager a more efficient method of reviewing and using the data and reports from the Uniform Inventory Control Point (UICP) computer system, a distributed computer system is necessary. By downloading the the appropriate inventory data from UICP to a local computer system, a decision support system (DSS) can be be implemented using existing off the shelf hardware and software. The ability to replace the present copious paper reports with concise computerized information and import that data into electronic spreadsheets for further analysis can greatly improve the inventory manager's effectiveness. To this end, this thesis provides inventory managers at ASO with access to the following functions: Interactive access to the main UICP database. The ability to use UICP data with a decision support system. A user interface that is easy to understand and learn. A local data base which supports working group requirements. Basic office automation. This thesis will cover the selection of the hardware and software, data identification and management and DSS development. A prototype system called the IM Workstation was developed for this thesis and used to produce the thesis document. COBOL and ALIS ELF macro program listings are provided. / http://archive.org/details/inventorymanager00mare / Lieutenant, United States Navy

A high level of delivery precision from a focal firm to their customers has the potential to provide competitive advantage amongst competing businesses. This report will detail the subject of inventory management and utilize theories on the subject in order to provide recommendations to a multinational company that wishes to increase their delivery precision. The results of the work conducted are presented and recommendations given in the form of firstly analyzing inventory and segregating the product range where applicable. This should be treated as the first priority to gain an insight into where potential problem areas lie and to determine the products that are the biggest contributors to the overall value of goods sold. As a secondary measure, managing supplier relations carefully and the strategic sourcing of materials are strategies that will help to effectively reduce problems through increased visibility of information in communication channels. An accurate demand forecasting model will predict demand ahead of time, ensuring that the correct products are being held as inventory for no longer than is strictly needed, with a safety stock system being used as a safety net for those products that are suitable. A theoretical implementation of exponential II smoothing based forecasting coupled with standard deviation based safety stock calculations, yields results that effectively raises delivery precision. By forecasting demand for individual months and using calculated safety stock levels, the model is able to adjust for the shortfall between forecasted demand and actual demand.

Many firms are challenged to make inventory decisions with limited data, and high customer service level requirements. This thesis focuses on heuristic solutions for inventory management problems in data-scarce environments, employing rigorous mathematical frameworks and taking advantage of the information that is available in practice but often ignored in literature. We define a class of inventory models and solutions with demonstrable value in helping firms solve these challenges.

Este estudo foca a gestão de estoques em cadeias de suprimentos. São construídos modelos de simulação para investigar diferentes estratégias de reposição de estoques em uma cadeia de suprimentos com dois estágios. São utilizadas técnicas de simulação por dinâmica de sistemas para o desenvolvimento dos modelos. Para tanto, analisa-se uma cadeia de suprimentos formada por dois agentes, um varejista e um fornecedor. Estes agentes devem tomar as decisões de reposição de estoques, definindo quantidades e momentos em que os materiais são adquiridos. Os objetivos principais do trabalho são: levantar na literatura quais são as principais estratégias para a gestão de estoques na cadeia de suprimentos, desenvolver modelos de simulação para as estratégias mais significativas, identificar qual das estratégias analisadas é a mais atraente para o fabricante, para o varejista e para a cadeia de suprimentos como um todo e ilustrar como a metodologia de simulação pode ser utilizada no estudo de estratégias de gestão de estoques. Três estratégias principais são identificadas na literatura e modeladas. Na primeira estratégia, os agentes tomam decisões independentemente e não compartilham informações. Na segunda estratégia, os agentes compartilham informações, mas as decisões continuam a ser tomadas independentemente. Na terceira estratégia, as decisões de reposição de estoques são tomadas pelo fornecedor, que tem acesso a todas as informações sobre venda e estoque no varejista. Observa-se que a amplificação na variação dos pedidos de um estágio para outro se reduz com o compartilhamento de informações e a centralização das decisões, sendo que esta última estratégia se mostra como a mais eficiente. O método utilizado demonstra-se bastante eficaz e pode ser usado para simular outras estratégias de reposição de estoque que não estão sendo analisadas no presente estudo. / This study focuses in the inventory management in supply chains. Simulation models are developed in order to investigate different inventory replenishment strategies in a two-echelon supply chain. Systems dynamics techniques are used to develop the models. Its analyzed a supply chain formed by two agents, a retailer and a supplier. These agents take inventory replenishment decisions, defining quantities and moments in which materials must be acquired. The main objectives of this work are: research in the literature the main inventory replenishment strategies for supply chains, develop simulation models for the main strategies, identify what strategy is more attractive for the supplier, the retailer and for the whole supply chain and illustrate how the simulation methodology can be used in the study of inventory management strategies. Three main strategies are identified in the literature and modeled. In the first strategy, the agents take decisions independently and dont share information. In the second strategy, the agents share information, but continue to take decisions independently. In the third strategy, the inventory replenishment decisions are taken by the supplier, which has access to all information about selling and inventory in the retailer. It is observed that the amplification in the supplier orders variation compared with the demand variation at the retailer are reduced with information share and decisions centralization, this last strategy being the more effective. It is demonstrated that the method is very effective and could be used to simulate other strategies that are not analyzed in this study.

O principal propósito deste trabalho é avaliar as principais variáveis que devem ser consideradas no dimensionamento do buffer de componentes de uma empresa que trabalha sob a ótica da Manufatura Enxuta, que devem ser fornecidos a uma célula de manufatura com mix variado de conjuntos similares a serem produzidos. Como mecanismo de validação da investigação, devido ao dinamismo inerente a operação de sistemas de produção com layout célular, foi utilizada a ferramenta Mapeamento de Fluxo de Valor com o apoio de uma estrutura de um software comercial de simulação computacional aplicando o otimizador do aplicativo desenvolvido a partir de um algoritmo genético a fim de contrapor o uso do abastecedor das células com o controle efetivo do nível de inventário do buffer. Como resultado são apresentados diferentes cenários definidos como experimentos tendo como principal fator a variação do tempo de ciclo de abastecimento executado e o fluxo de material como parâmetro inerente a demanda por cada um dos componentes consumidos na operação da célula de manufatura. Através das análises dos resultados foi concluído que os elevados níveis de estoque se tornam ou não necessários dependendo preliminarmente da capacidade de carregamento por ciclo de abastecimento do transportador e o tempo de ciclo necessário para a realização da atividade de ressuprimento. A relevância do tema de pesquisa estudado encontra-se na contribuição pertinente às informações adquiridas in loco na realidade de uma empresa que trabalha sob a ótica da Manufatura Enxuta, no crescente aumento da complexidade dos sistemas produtivos e, consequentemente, da dificuldade de análises mais precisas do impacto que as variáveis de fluxo, como por exemplo, tempo de abastecimento e movimentação, tempo de setup e os respectivos roteiros de fabricação podem causar no desempenho dos processos no chão de fábrica. / The main purpose of this work is to evaluate the main variables that must be considered in the component buffer dimensioning of a company that works with Lean Manufacturing, which to a manufacturing cell should be supplied with a varied mix of similar sets to be produced . As a research validation mechanism, due to the dynamism inherent in the operation of production systems with cell layout, the Value Stream Mapping tool was used with the support of a commercial software simulation structure applying the developed application optimizer from a genetic algorithm in order to counteract the use of the cell supplier with the effective control of the inventory level of the buffer. As a result, different scenarios defined as experiments are presented, the main factor being the variation of the supply cycle time executed and the material flow as a parameter inherent to the demand for each of the components consumed in the manufacturing cell operation. Through the analysis of the results it was concluded that high levels of stock become or not necessary depending on the loading capacity per transport cycle of the conveyor and the cycle time required to perform the resupply activity. The relevance of the studied research theme lies in the relevant contribution to the information acquired locally in the reality of a company that works from the perspective of the Lean Manufacturing, in the increasing complexity of the productive systems and, consequently, of the difficulty of more precise analyzes of the impact that the flow variables, such as supply and handling time, setup time and the respective manufacturing routes, can cause in the process performance on the shop floor.

No description available.