A microcomputer inventory control package for controlling families of items

Inventory management is concerned with two basic questions: 1. how much to reorder, and 2. when to reorder. The answers to these questions depend upon demand rates, available discounts, the cost of placing orders, the cost of holding inventory, the time it takes to receive an order, the desired service level, and so on. Recently the authors developed a new class of inventory control models. One feature of these models is that inventory items are grouped together and are considered as families, and quantity discounts are available when a family of items is reordered. To demonstrate the usefulness of the present models the authors developed a comprehensive microcomputer Inventory Control package. In what follows they will briefly describe the models and how they are used to answer the two basic questions in a friendly, interactive, microcomputer package. The present objective is to show that complex inventory models can be used on microcomputers.