SUPPLY CHAIN INFORMATION SHARING IN A VENDOR MANAGED INVENTORY PARTNERSHIP

Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) involves the vendor making the replenishment decision for products supplied to a customer based on various inventory and supply chain policies. Information sharing between supply chain members is required in VMI. Sometimes VMI decisions are delayed and/or the information shared is inaccurate. This research examines the effects of information delay and accuracy, and the sharing of sales and forecast information in a VMI environment facing stationary and nonstationary demand. The simulation experiments show the impact of information delay, information inaccuracy, and information sharing on a variety of performance measures, including inventory levels and fill rates.     

CATALOG RETAILER IN‐STOCK PERFORMANCE: AN ASSESSMENT OF CUSTOMER SERVICE LEVELS

The purpose of this article is to study the level of “in‐stock” customer service performance being offered in the catalog channel of distribution. The article provides benchmark information for the catalog industry. More importantly, the article serves as one test of the effectiveness of the modern supply chain, where the expectation is for near perfect orders. Customer service levels are studied by using an empirical observation methodology in which catalog retailer's in‐stock performance was measured. Comparisons are made across item type, season, retailer type, and days from catalog receipt. Overall, items were out‐of‐stock during 15.9% of all checkpoints, compared to an 11.8% stock‐out rate in an earlier study of bricks and mortar retailers.     

Comparing the impacts of Internet technology and national culture on online usage and purchase from a four-country perspective

The Internet has successfully generated an ever-expanding cohort of users for all its major concomitant activities, including information gathering, communications and transactions. So far no attempt has been made to validate whether such a success is so deep as to transcend national cultures. Nor any work has been conducted to compare the internationalisation¹ performances between online usage activities. The current study addresses these two research gaps from the perspective of four countries, i.e. Britain, Germany, Japan and Taiwan. Results show that although the technological forces have been quite successful in internationalising overall online usage activities, they succumb to the cultural forces as far as only the transactions activity, or more colloquially online purchase, is concerned. This indicates the relative difficulty in internationalising online purchase vis-à-vis other online usage activities. Further research on locating a series of step functions or kick-off time points regarding the development of online purchase is suggested.