The Vendor Managed Inventory Model Under Supply Chain Management

With the highly developed science and technology, rapidly developed information technology and greatly changed market competition, supply chain management has become the key strategic competition resource of enterprises. VMI came into being in the 1980s, and is successfully being carried out by more and more companies. As an inventory model under supply chain management, VMI connects the companies in the supply chain and avoids the problems such as asymmetric information, big forecast errors, long lead time and high inventory costs engendered under the traditional management models. The buyers share the forecasting data and information of inventory with the vendors in the VMI model, then by controlling the inventory with systematic and integrated management, the supply chain can work synchronously and efficiently.The thesis firstly introduces the research background and significance of this article, summarizes the research home and abroad on vendor managed inventory under supply chain management; Secondly the thesis elaborates the necessity of inventory management and the problems engendered in the traditional inventory management, proposes that VMI is an effective way to deal with the bullwhip effect. Then four VMI models considering the linear time-varying demand, exponential time-varying demand, partial backlogging, deteriorating items, time-limited free back-orders, time value of costs are constructed, which widen the applying range of the former models. The optimal order times of buyers and a vendor are confirmed in the numerical examples and sensitivity analyses are presented to illustrate the models. The results demonstrate that each main parameter has different sensitivity to the costs of each VMI system, which can provide for the VMI system to make better management decision. At last, the summarization and future directi of the thesis are outlined.Four VMI models with high practicality, feasibility and operation are built based on the studies before. The thesis expands the theory on this field, which makes a great contribution to the development of supply chain management.