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Companies increasingly employ dual-channeling strategies with online and offline channels to reach customers. The combination of high return rates in e-commerce and the possibility for customers to return products ordered online at any offline store may result in unbalanced inventories. Transshipments can be used to deal with these unbalanced inventories. In this paper we study dynamic policies for transshipment of products that are returned cross-channel from online to offline stores. At the end of each period in a finite sales season, cross-channel returned products can be transshipped back to the online store or kept on-hand at the offline store. Optimal transshipment policies are obtained using a Markov decision process. We introduce a well-performing heuristic based on the expected costs during the sales season, with a maximum deviation of 1.59 % from the optimal costs in experiments. Furthermore, we show that in all instances our heuristic outperforms static policies in which products are either always or never shipped back to the online store. We observe that dynamic transshipment policies are more effective than static policies in dealing with imbalances in the initial stock. Dynamic transshipment of cross-channel returns seems to open up possibilities for more effective demand fulfillment of dual-channel companies.

A research method for multi-echelon inventory allocation of civil aircraft spare parts with lateral transshipments and maintenance ratio is proposed in this paper, and the maintenance rate is considered into the inventory model, aiming at the problem of multi-echelon inventory allocation with lateral transshipments for civil aircraft spare parts. Firstly, the principle of the multi-echelon inventory model with lateral transshipments and maintenance ratio is proposed. Then, by considering the fleet availability and the satisfaction ratio as the constraints, a mathematical model is built with the inventory system total cost as the optimization objective. Secondly, the procedure of solving multi-echelon inventory allocation model considering the influence of lateral transshipments and maintenance ratio is discussed based on the marginal analysis method. Finally, some components of Boeing 737 are selected as the research objects, the multi-echelon inventory allocation is investigated by considering lateral transshipments and maintenance ratio. The analysis results in this paper show the best number of multi echelon inventory allocation, the minimum inventory system total cost and the fleet availability are 1.205 million dollars and 0.9909 respectively. Comparing the traditional inventory model without considering lateral transshipments and maintenance ratio, and the model which only considers the maintenance ratio, the results indicate that the model offered in this paper could reduce the total cost of inventory system significantly, and provides theoretical support and method guidance for the accurate allocation of multi echelon inventory optimization for civil aircraft spare parts.

Various rental systems, such as public libraries and tool rental companies, have a support warehouse for storing rental products at low cost and carrying out expedited shipments in response to stock-outs at local warehouses. In case of stock-outs, rental systems commonly employ partial backordering, i.e., a limited number of demands is backordered while additional demand is lost. We include partial backordering in our models and demonstrate its relevance. We fully characterize costs and optimal base stock policies in cases with one support and one local warehouse and provide upper bounds for base stock levels in the general system. By enumerating base stock policies and evaluating exact costs numerically, we determine optimal base stock policies for small systems with up to six local warehouses. For larger systems we develop a greedy algorithm based on approximate cost evaluations. The resulting base stock policies have costs within 0.2% from optimality on average in experiments. Among other things, experiments indicate that existing methods with no backordering may lead to poor solutions with partial backordering and that partial backordering is an effective means to reduce lost demand even with limited partial backorder levels. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

We consider a multi-item spare parts problem with multiple warehouses and two customer classes, where lateral transshipments are used as a differentiation tool. Specifically, premium requests that cannot be met from stock at their preferred warehouse may be satisfied from stock at other warehouses (so-called lateral transshipments). We first derive approximations for the mean waiting time per class in a single-item model with selective lateral transshipments. Next, we embed our method in a multi-item model minimizing the holding costs and costs of lateral and emergency shipments from upstream locations in the network. Compared to the option of using only selective emergency shipments for differentiation, the addition of selective lateral transshipments can lead to significant further cost savings (14% on average). ?? 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Library customers can soon order books online and specify a location to collect them from. Libraries exchange books between locations to meet these requests. Two types of exchanges take place: transshipments from library to library to fulfill the requests and rebalancing to redistribute books between libraries. This research determines optimal decisions for transshipments and rebalancing, so that logistic costs in the library system are minimized. In current practice, libraries typically send the book back to the original library after return. We consider a more general policy, in which we rebalance books in anticipation of demand. Moreover, we determine the optimal location from which to transship a book when it is unavailable at the location of demand. By means of stochastic dynamic programming, we derive the optimal policy for small instances. For larger instances we present two heuristics: the cluster and the expected shortage reduction (ESR) heuristic. The ESR heuristic proves to be near-optimal and significantly outperforms current practice. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Lateral transshipments within an inventory system are stock movements between locations of the same echelon. These transshipments can be conducted periodically at predetermined points in time to proactively redistribute stock, or they can be used reactively as a method of meeting demand which cannot be satisfied from stock on hand. The elements of an inventory system considered, e.g. size, cost structures and service level definition, all influence the best method of transshipping. Models of many different systems have been considered. This paper provides a literature review which categorizes the research to date on lateral transshipments, so that these differences can be understood and gaps within the literature can be identified. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Lateral transshipments are a method of responding to shortages of stock in a network of inventory-holding locations. Conventional reactive approaches only seek to meet immediate shortages. The study proposes hybrid transshipments which exploit economies of scale by moving additional stock between locations to prevent future shortages in addition to meeting immediate ones. The setting considered is motivated by retailers who operate networks of outlets supplying car parts via a system of periodic replenishment. It is novel in allowing non-stationary stochastic demand and general patterns of dependence between multiple item types. The generality of our work makes it widely applicable. We develop an easy-to-compute quasi-myopic heuristic for determining how hybrid transshipments should be made. We obtain simple characterizations of the heuristic and demonstrate its strong cost performance in both small and large networks in an extensive numerical study.

In managing an inventory network, two approaches to the pooling of stock have been proposed. Reactive transshipments respond to shortages at a location by moving inventory from elsewhere within the network, while proactive stock redistribution seeks to minimize the chance of future stockouts. This paper is the first to propose an enhanced reactive approach in which individual transshipments are viewed as an opportunity for proactive stock redistribution. We adopt a quasi-myopic approach to the development of a strongly performing enhanced reactive transshipment policy. In comparison to a purely reactive approach to transshipment, service levels are improved while a reduction in safety stock levels is achieved. The aggregate costs incurred in managing the system are significantly reduced, especially so for large networks. Moreover, an optimal policy is determined for small networks and it is shown that the enhanced reactive policy substantially closes the gap to optimality. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Inventory redistribution and emergency replenishment in supply chains have long been studied in various contexts. From our strategic perspective, both systems can be used alternatively to cope with product shortages in a supply chain, especially for situations where high shortage costs are involved. In this paper, we present an incorporated scheme of lateral transshipments and emergency orders in a multi-location inventory system. We focused on a complex distribution network consisting of a capacitated distribution center and multiple retailers. A mathematical model is formulated in order to determine optimal inventory policies of the integrated systems. Lastly, we proposed a solution methodology using a hybrid Genetic Algorithm to solve the integrated multi-location inventory problem.