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This paper sets out to discuss practical inventory control systems. Orthodox theory revolves around the purchaser and balances ordering costs against charges for carrying goods in stock. However, for any company holding thousands of different items the directives for constructing the best system(s) are confusing and the logic seems inconsistent. The research objective is to clarify this hitherto unsatisfactory situation and to provide robust guidelines for managing such inventories.

A small number of published examples are described in sufficient detail to reveal what these firms actually do. Each case is dissected to uncover management's motives, since the original reports were not embellished with useful analytical comments. The aim is to reconstruct the overall design process.

The myopic standpoint of established models neglects the impact of various ordering policies at the supplier's end, where the promotion of cost‐effective and responsive warehouse and transport operations is paramount. As a rule, both areas benefit from stable resources planning, based on cyclic orders and delivery schedules along fixed vehicle routes.

An alternative “top down” approach is proposed. The main thrust is the efficient deployment of a designated transport fleet. Also, some salient points are made concerning the relative merits of P‐ and Q‐type stock replenishment modes.

The paper provides a new perspective on stock control that brings theory into line with modern supply chain management concepts.

Business conditions of electronics manufacturers are demanding due to ever shortening product life‐cycles, higher variety and increased outsourcing activity. Even though companies could manage the increasing amount of purchased items with modularity, software‐based customization and well designed product platforms; the case is often so that item count in purchasing is increasing with high rates. On the top of this, time of the purchasing is being largely spent in new component search and management of end of product life cycle components/products. Therefore, organizations are faced to automate all of the possible manual ordering phases in order to increase the productivity of this function. Our purpose in this paper is to reveal how electronics manufacturers could achieve this challenging objective, and what are the possible causes for implementation success/failure.

The paper uses case study findings and obtained data from four year period, when middle‐sized electronics manufacturer started to use automated purchasing with some of its high volume purchasing components. Case study also contains brief introduction for the supply chain and business environment of electronics, and highlights the important role of component distributors.

The research results reveal following outcomes: in a majority of automated ordering components inventory turns were higher as compared to manual mode results, the demand fluctuation in different components showed lower deviation and in limited number of cases internal and external factors caused inventory turn decrease.

Research results provide needed practical evidence for the middle‐sized electronics manufacturers that automated purchasing implementations are valuable for them, and highlight the importance of different services provided by the component distributors. So, the implementation success is a combination of ERP system integration as well as supply chain solutions. Mostly for academics this paper provides empirical evidence from the applied ordering algorithms, and identified caveats of purchasing automation.

Perishable inventory management for the grocery sector has become more challenging with extended omnichannel activities and emerging consumer expectations. This paper aims to identify and formalize key performance measures of omnichannel perishable inventory management (OCPI) and explore the influence of operational and market-related factors on these measures.

The inductive approach of this research synthesizes three performance measures (product waste, lost sales and freshness) and four influencing factors (channel effect, demand variability, product perishability and shelf life visibility) for OCPI, through industry investigation, expert interviews and a systematic literature review. Treating OCPI as a complex adaptive system and considering its transaction costs, this paper formalizes the OCPI performance measures and their influencing factors in two statements and four propositions, which are then tested through numerical analysis with simulation.

Product waste, lost sales and freshness are identified as distinctive OCPI performance measures, which are influenced by product perishability, shelf life visibility, demand variability and channel effects. The OCPI sensitivity to those influencing factors is diverse, whereas those factors are found to moderate each other's effects.

To manage perishables more effectively, with less waste and lost sales for the business and fresher products for the consumer, omnichannel firms need to consider store and online channel requirements and strive to reduce demand variability, extend product shelf life and facilitate item-level shelf life visibility. While flexible logistics capacity and dynamic pricing can mitigate demand variability, the product shelf life extension needs modifications in product design, production, or storage conditions. OCPI executives can also increase the product shelf life visibility through advanced stock monitoring/tracking technologies (e.g. smart tags or more comprehensive barcodes), particularly for the online channel which demands fresher products.

This paper provides a novel theoretical view on perishables in omnichannel systems. It specifies the OCPI performance, beyond typical inventory policies for cost minimization, while discussing its sensitivity to operations and market factors.

The purpose of this paper is to study integrated inventory system and pricing and ordering strategy for vendor‐buyer supply chain system. Here, the vendor offers a trade credit to the buyer when the buyer's order quantity exceeds a given pre‐specified quantity. Therefore, to incorporate the concept of vendor‐buyer integration and trade credit linked, the authors analyze the model to determine the optimal strategy for an integrated vendor‐buyer inventory system under the condition of credit linked to the order quantity when demand is quadratic.

A mathematical model for integrated inventory system is developed when demand rate is increasing function of the time and decreasing function of the retail price. By analyzing the total channel profit function, the authors developed some useful results to characterize the optimal solution and provide an iterative algorithm to find the retail price, buyer's order quantity and the number of shipments per production run from the vendor to the buyer.

By developing a solution algorithm, the optimal retail price, order quantity and number of shipments from the vendor to the buyer are provided. Numerical examples and sensitivity analyses are presented to validate the proposed model. Through extensive numerical analyses, it is observed that a longer credit term increases profits of the player for the entire supply chain. The vendor should establish the threshold for allowing trade credit comprehensively to ensure the greatest benefit for both players.

Most of the research articles available in the literature considered the constant demand or linearly changing demand. In this paper, a mathematical model is developed considering time dependent quadratic demand. Very few researchers have investigated joint optimal policy in vendor‐buyer supply chain system, considering trade credit is linked to order quantity, and still there are not many findings on the benefit of integrated policy and trade credit.

From on-board automotive diagnostics to real-time aircraft state of health, the implementation of health monitoring and management systems are an increasing trend. Further, reductions in operating budgets are forcing many companies and militaries to consider new operating and support environments. Combined with longer service lives for aircraft and other systems, maintenance and operations processes must be reconsidered. The majority of research efforts focus on health monitoring techniques and technologies, leaving others to determine the maintenance and logistics impact on the systems. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This research analyzes the impact of a health monitoring system on a squadron of aircraft. Flight, maintenance and logistics operations are stochastically modeled to determine the impact of program decisions on supply metrics. An arena discrete event simulation is utilized to conduct this research on 20 components on each of the 12 aircraft modeled. Costs and availability are recorded for comparison across three sparing scenarios to include economic order quantity (EOQ) for baseline and health monitoring cases and a just-in-time (JIT) health monitoring set of simulations.

Data are presented for EOQ and JIT supply methods. A comparison of health monitoring enabled supply to current methods shows cost savings and availability gains. The different methodologies are compared and discussed as a trade-space for programmatic decisions.

This work demonstrates the ability of health monitoring systems and condition based maintenance to affect supply ordering decisions. The development of trade-spaces within operating environments is demonstrated along with the ability to conduct cost benefit analyses.

Organization efforts in groups generate interaction and procedural structures, or “rules of behavior”. The type and extent of structuring are affected by preexisting preferences among group members for a desired degree of procedural order, as well as by the communication media available in the meeting environment. Analysis of thirty partially‐distributed groups that met over a series of four sessions was conducted by using two methods. Questionnaires were administered to ascertain perceptions of satisfaction and procedural practices. Content analysis was used to determine actual procedural behavioral patterns. It appears that preferences for procedural order does affect structuring behaviors, but do not affect their satisfaction with the group process. Interestingly, and counter to the expectations elicited from a history of media richness theory and studies, results here indicate that interaction media (video conferencing vs. audio conferencing) have no affect on either members’ perceptions of procedural structuring, their satisfaction, or their actual procedural structuring practices. Implications of these results are discussed.

Inventory management is an extremely important function to any business, since inadequacies in control can result in serious problems. If inventories are managed in an inefficient manner, it is likely that delays in production, dissatisfied customers, or curtailment of working capital will result.

The Library Electronic Ordering (LEO) service, created by Stirling University Library, makes it possible to submit orders for library materials via the University's intranet. Orders can be for any type of material and are received by the library as e‐mails then processed for ordering. The paper describes the web form creation, including the technical details of the form construction and method of processing.

The computer book ordering system now in operation in Kent County Library is described and its development traced. It is based on the use of Standard Book Numbers accessing a main file of authors, titles, and prices to produce the orders to booksellers. All accounting and checking procedures are fully automated and reminders are sent automatically. Some staff savings have been realised, many routines abolished, and a much greater financial control achieved.

VINE is produced at least four times a year with the object of providing up‐to‐date news of work being done in the automation of library housekeeping processes, principally in the UK. It is edited and substantially written by the Information Officer for Library Automation based in Southampton University Library and supported by a grant from the British Library Research and Development Department. Copyright for the articles rests with the British Library Board and opinions expressed in VINE do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the British Library. The subscription for 1984 to VINE is: £23 for UK subscribers, £26 to overseas subscribers (including airmail delivery). Second and subsequent copies to the same address are charged at £14 for UK and £16 for overseas. VINE is available in either paper or microfiche copy and all back issues are available on microfiche.