The single-vendor single-buyer integrated inventory problem with quality improvement and lead time reduction – minimax distribution-free approach

In past two decades, the Japanese successful experience in using Just-In-Time (JIT) production has received a great deal of attention. The underlying goal of JIT is to eliminate waste. This can be achieved through various efforts, such as shortening lead time and improving quality. In this paper, we investigate the impact of investing in quality improvement and lead time reduction on the integrated vendor–buyer inventory model with partial backorders. We assume that the lead time demand probability distribution is unknown, while the mean and standard deviation are known and finite. The minimax distribution-free procedure is applied to solve this problem. Also, numerical examples are given to illustrate the results.