هماهنگی سیاست های قیمت گذاری و تکمیل دوباره موجودی برای یک عمده فروش و یا خرده فروشانی که از لحاظ جغرافیایی پراکنده هستند

We analyze coordination issues in a supply chain consisting of one wholesaler and one or more retailers under deterministic price-sensitive customer demand. Operating costs include purchasing, setup, order processing, and inventory costs. We consider both pricing and lot sizing decisions and take special care to correctly account for the impact of transfer prices and ownership of retail-inventory. We show that a solution that maximizes channel profits can be interpreted as consignment selling. We also show that separating pricing and lot sizing decisions is near optimal when the demand rate is sufficiently large.

The central theme of multi-echelon inventory has been the coordination of lot sizing decisions among vertically integrated firms. Modern supply chain management can derive important insights by revisiting multi-echelon inventory models in the context of non-vertically integrated firms where pricing decisions, in addition to lot sizing decisions, need to be coordinated. There is ample empirical evidence on the growing trend in practice towards integrated supply chain management. For example, a recent survey by Deloitte Consulting [1] concludes that “extending the supply chain is number one priority” for more than 200 large manufacturers and distributors in the United States and Canada, representing a wide cross section of industries including aerospace, automotive, consumer products, high-tech, among others. Fortunately, advances in information technology enable firms to rapidly exchange products, information and funds, and utilize collaborative methods to optimize supply chain operations. As a result, supply chain members are moving away from traditional arms’ length relationships, and are forming creative “partnerships” (e.g. consignment selling, vendor managed inventory) that are based on information exchange and a team approach of making channel decisions (see Handfield and Nichols [2] and Kumar [3] for example). In this paper we first study a supply chain consisting of a single wholesaler, a single retailer, and a group of consumers whose collective demand is decreasing in price. We focus on inventory and pricing policies that jointly maximize channel (wholesale plus retail) profits (net revenues minus inventory related costs). In doing so, we account for the impact of retail inventory ownership on channel holding costs, which is characterized by the timing of transfer payments from the retailer to the wholesaler. We find that earlier conclusions about the desirability of wholesaler-led or jointly negotiated quantity discount policies depend crucially on the implicit assumption of retailer owned inventory. We find that an optimal coordinated policy can be implemented as a nested replenishment policy where the retailer pays the wholesaler the unit wholesale price as the items are sold, and the retail price is set jointly. By adjusting the wholesale price, this inventory-consignment policy is also capable of distributing the gains of channel coordination without requiring side-payments. We also explore the suboptimality induced (in channel profits) by first making retail pricing decisions (ignoring inventory related costs) and then making inventory replenishment decisions for the resulting prices. We show that this practice of separating pricing and lot sizing decisions is near optimal for inventory systems with high demand rates. This “separation theorem” vindicates the current practice of separating marketing (pricing) and operational (lot sizing) decisions, and indicates that opportunities to improve profits by coordinating these decisions are limited to systems with relatively low demand rates. Finally, we extend most of our results to the case of multiple geographically dispersed retailers. This paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we provide an overview of the existing literature. In Section 3, we develop our model and explore the impact of the ownership of the retail inventory. In Section 4 we analyze total channel profit function and discuss various methods to implement the optimal policy. Section 5 discusses the extension of our model to the multiple retailers. Section 6 contains our concluding remarks.