A comparison study on retailer-managed and vendor-managed inventory policies in the retail supply chain

Vendor-managed inventory policy (VMIP) is a supply-chain initiative where the supplier is authorized to manage inventories of items at retail locations. In VMIP, the supplier monitors sales and stock information at retail locations and makes decisions of inventory replenishment and transportation simultaneously. VMIP has been known as an effective supply chain strategy that can realize many of the benefits obtainable only in a fully integrated supply chain. However, VMIP does not always lead to lower the supply chain cost. It sometimes generates the total supply chain cost higher than the traditional retailer-managed inventory policy (RMIP). In this paper, we perform a comparison study on RMIP and VMIP in the retail supply chain which consists of a single supplier and a number of retailers. We formulate mixed integer programming models for both RMIP and VMIP with vehicle routing problems and perform computational experiments on various test problems. Furthermore, we derive the conditions which guarantee the dominant position for VMIP with respect to total supply chain cost in the simple retail supply chain.