Quick Response in a Continuous-Replenishment-Programme Based Manufacturer Retailer Supply Chain

Abstract

With the widespread concept of partnership in supply chain management, the traditional replenishment process is fast giving way to the Quick Response (QR) and Continuous Replenishment Programme (CRP). QR is a movement in industries to shorten the replenishment lead time which is critical to reduce inventory level and improve the levels of customer service. Wal-Mart, Seven-Eleven Japan, and many other retailers apply tremendous pressure on their suppliers to reduce the replenishment lead time (Chopra and Mendil 2007). CRP is an efficient replenishment initiative which focuses on removing excess inventory throughout the pipeline and synchronizes demand with production (EAN International 2000). In CRP, the inventory of retailer is planned, monitored, and replenished by the supplier on behalf of the consumers. To enable CRP, sales data and inventory level of the retailer must be provided to the supplier via Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) or other electronic means. Thus, to successfully implement CRP requires the supplier and the retailer to work in a cooperative manner based on mutual trust and joint gains. The lead time is needed for several operations among trading parties, such as ordering, manufacturing, delivering, and handling. In practice, lead time can be shortened with extra crashing costs. Many researchers have studied the inventory decision incorporating lead time reduction under various assumptions. For example, Liao and Shyu (1991) first developed an inventory model in which lead time was the unique decision variable. BenDaya and Raouf (1994) extended the previous model by including both lead time and order quantity as decision variables. Pan and Yang (2002) and Pan and Hsiao (2005) considered lead time crashing cost as a function of both the order quantity and the reduced lead time. Since the reduction of lead time may involve with the vendor and the buyer to improve the related operations, a dyadic vendor-buyer viewpoint for shortening lead time is often suggested. For instance, Iyer and Bergen (1997) compare the profits of a single vendor and a single buyer supply chain before and after QR based on a newsboy inventory model. BenDaya and Hariga (2004), Ouyang et al. (2004), Chang et al. (2006), and Ouyang et al. (2007)