On using higher-order moments for stochastic inventory systems

The lead time demand in a stochastic inventory system is often simplified as a normal distribution in practice, whereas the higher-order moments are seldom applied in inventory management due to the difficulty of accessing necessary statistics tables for practitioners. In this paper, we have introduced the Bowman–Shenton formulae for calculating safety factors in modelling a compound distribution. This approximation makes it easy to implement the higher-order moment approach. Our numerical examples show that the system performance measure, in terms of service level, has been significantly improved when we use a Pearson curve, especially at a high service level.