Designing smart replenishment systems: Internet-of-Things technology for vendor-managed inventory at end consumers
研究利用物联网技术获取终端消费者的消费点信息，将供应商管理库存扩展到终端消费者，通过仿真实验证明该信息能显著提升服务水平和产能利用率，并提出了灵活的再订货走廊来管理库存。
Motivated by recent advances in Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology for household appliances, we analyze a Smart Replenishment system that leverages point-of-consumption (POC) information at end consumers to decide on deliveries of consumables. As such, we extend the classic Vendor-Managed Inventory (VMI) concept to end consumers. We model the system for a single manufacturer who directly serves N end consumers with uncertain demand. End consumers partially adopt the new Smart Replenishment mode, which results in a mix of VMI and non-VMI customers. We assume that unfulfilled demand is lost and that the manufacturer’s dispatch capacity is constrained. Customers compete for the same capacity while featuring different out-of-stock risks and service-level expectations, both of which are costly to the manufacturer. Considering various adoption levels, we decide on the design of such a system and focus on (i) inventory control, (ii) customer prioritization, and (iii) degree of smart, integrated decision-making. Using discrete-event simulation and a full-factorial experiment, we show that replenishment decisions can be significantly enhanced with POC information. It leads to substantial improvements in service levels and capacity utilization without loading customers with inventories. This improvement potential is highest for a low demand coverage of the replenishment quantity, a high gap in the ordering behavior of manufacturer and end consumers, and a long lead time. To realize this improvement potential, we propose a flexible reorder corridor to manage inventories at VMI customers that balances the trade-off between out-of-stock risk and service-level expectation inherent in the system.