| Article ID: | iaor1996409 |
| Country: | United Kingdom |
| Volume: | 46 |
| Issue: | 7 |
| Start Page Number: | 892 |
| End Page Number: | 895 |
| Publication Date: | Jul 1995 |
| Journal: | Journal of the Operational Research Society |
| Authors: | Guo Y., Ganeshan R. |
| Keywords: | supply |
This paper investigates how the mean and variance of lead time change with the number of suppliers. Using known analytical results for the means and variances of the ‘first’ and ‘spacing’ lead times, the authors give simple decision rules to find the optimal numbers of suppliers when lead times are uniformly or exponentially distributed.