Study On The Inventory Strategy Of Community Fresh Retails Terminals Considering The Influence Of Inventory And Time On Deterioration Rate

As an emerging retail format,community fresh food retailing provides residents with more convenient and faster fresh food purchasing services by building up retail terminals in communities,which is gradually changing the way of urban consumers to buy fresh products.Due to deterioration and the short life cycle,fresh product is the most difficult and most costly category of retail commodities.Therefore,many community fresh food retail companies are facing transformation and even closure due to heavy losses.How to avoid the backlog or shortage of the product and improve the profitability has already become an urgent problem for community fresh food retail companies.The inventory strategy of fresh products is a factor of great importance that affects the profitability of fresh food retail enterprises or terminals.Since the fresh product is a typical sort of perishable products,the existing literature on the inventory control of perishable products has been very rich,but there are few of them consider the impact of product inventory on the deterioration rate in combination with the life characteristics of fresh products.Based on the existing research,this paper takes into consideration the short life cycle of fresh products and constructs a time-dependent segmented demand function.Besides,on analyzing the causes of the deterioration of fresh products,this article considers that microbial activities related to storage time and the concentration of plant hormones related tot product inventory are the factors that have impacts on the product deterioration,and therefore constructs the function of deterioration rate depended on time and inventory.This paper focuses on the delivery-based and store-based community fresh food retailing modes,and studies the inventory strategy of sales terminals with the goal of maximizing sales profit taking the impact of time and inventory on the deterioration rate of fresh products,the impact of inventory display on the demand in store sales and the short life cycle characteristics of fresh products into consideration.First of all,this paper analyzes the characteristics of delivery-based mode and store-based mode of community fresh food sales terminals and their problems of excessive cost and partial optimization strategies in inventory management,as well as the factors affecting the inventory strategy of community fresh food sales terminals such as demand,deterioration rate,cost and consumers' channel selection probabilities.Then with the goal of maximizing the profit,inventory models of delivery-based sales terminals and store-based sales terminals are built respectively and solved by genetic algorithms to work out the order cycles and order quantities per cycle for sales terminal,as well as the daily replenishment cycles and the highest inventory level on shelf in the store.Finally,the feasibility and effectiveness of the models is verified by an example,and a sensitivity analysis is performed on the coefficient of deterioration intensity and the selection probability of consumption channels.By modeling and case analysis,it is believed that in the current consumer market and the community fresh food business model,the store-based mode is advanced in profit rather than the delivery-based mode of community fresh food retailing.Besides,in order to improve the profitability level,the operators of community fresh food sales terminals should make investment in necessary cold chain equipment and fully consider the structure of resident in the community,so that they are able to lower the deterioration rate of the fresh products,arrange the inventory products rationally and adjust inventory cycles and inventory levels flexibly.There are 22 figures,7 tables and 68 references in this paper.