Multi-item/Two-stage JIT Joint Replenishment Considering Consumer Response To Stock-out

In the practice of consumer retailing industry,it is inevitable to experience stock-outs in joint replenishment due to such limits as inventory resources and lack of rational analysis of consumer demand.The retailer's ordering decision affects the customers' buying situation,which affects the customers' buying behavior.The sales profit is a measuring rule to check whether the ordering decision is reasonable or not.As the dominant power in the purchase decision process,customers' different responses to out-of-stock situations affect the demand for intentionally purchased products and their substitutes.Analysis of customer response to stockout,quantifying the situation into ordering decisions,and finding an ordering strategy that is conducive to improving sales profit is the problem to be studied in this paper.The conclusions will help retailers make appropriate ordering decisions.This paper brings in the customer response to stockout in the field of behavioral science to the joint ordering decision,which makes the decision-making problem nonlinear and complicated.Based on the limitations of inventory resources and strategies of JIT inventory,this paper establishes the multi-item/two-stage JIT joint replenishment decision-making model with the objective of retailer profit maximization,and designs the improved imperialist competitive algorithm accordingly.The authors select 18 kinds of products from the research report by Grocery Manufacturers Association of America and conduct example tests of three scales.The results verify the effectiveness of model and algorithm.The research shows that:(1)The decision making of multi-item/two-stage JIT joint replenishment with the consideration of CRS,compared with no consideration of CRS,can not only improve customer service level,but also increase the total profit of retailers by employing CRS's rule efficiently.It could minimize the impact of stock-out for the limitation of inventory resources in a great extent and decrease the cost of stock-out by product substitution with consideration of CRS.Meanwhile,it could provide a stable product supplies for consumers by managing CRS carefully.(2)In the premise of limited inventory resources,joint replenishment of multi groups of item should consider the reciprocal relationship of product within the group on one hand,and the resource allocation relationship with other product groups on the other hand.Two key factors influencing the peer group substitution decisions are the maximum substitution rate of product and the disparities in opportunity benefit of unit inventory resource with substitutes peer group.More specifically,if the opportunity benefits of unit inventory resource in peer group are approximate each other,no replacement would be made in peer group;if the opportunity benefits of unit inventory resource in the group are higher than those in other groups,no stock-out would occur in the group;if the opportunity benefits of unit inventory resource in peer group vary significantly and are higher than those in other groups,substitution and stock-out would be shown in the group;(3)Two key factors influencing the allocation of resources are the opportunity benefits of unit resource and the opportunity benefits of unit surplus resource in different groups.More specifically,if the opportunity benefits of unit inventory resource in peer group vary significantly,substitution and stock-out would occur in the group;if the opportunity benefits of unit surplus resource are lower than the opportunity benefits of unit resource in other groups,the surplus resources of the product would be transferred to other out-of-stock products.The findings of the research could provide references to the decision making of multi-item/two-stage JIT joint replenishment for retailers.