Robustness of order reliability models with applications to order ageing

The authors examine a simple inventory model that predicts order reliability, a customer service metric often used in supply chain inventory models. They discuss the early applications of this model to predict product availability in make-to-stock systems and more recent applications of the model in make-to-order environments. The authors show how the model can be used to create order ageing curves which describe service performance over time and graphically illustrate the implications of demand variability on system performance. Through an extensive experimental investigation, they examine the robustness of this simple model and find that it performs well, even when the underlying assumptions of the model are violated.