Coordination of replenishment activities

Extensive research on the Economic Lot Scheduling Problem (ELSP), and on related topics, has produced powerful techniques originally designed to solve quite specific (coordinat−ion) problems. This paper emphasizes the omni-presence of coordination issues in multi-item inventories, characterizes them as problems of staggering and/or clustering replenishment activities or events, and shows how ELSP techniques combine to form a pertinent and fairly comprehensive methodology. A numerical example illustrates the use of one particularly powerful tool (powers of two) in stabilizing replenishment workloads.