Inventory management systems: Control and information issues

This dissertation addresses the management of inventory systems. The thesis starts with an exposition on mathematical models that can be used in inventory theory. Then we deal with some information issues related to the demand process. Namely, how to control products that have intermittent demand. Moreover, we investigated the impact of data collection on the customer performance. Next, we investigated to what extend multiple-sourcing can lead to improvements of the inventory system. Finally two demand management strategies are investigated for smoothing demand. The first re-routes large customer orders to alternative stockpoint, whereas the second strategy splits a customer order in a time-phased delivery scheme.