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The research mainly aims at the hotspot of inventory management by knowledge mapping and provides a visualization reference in this research field.

First, inventory management journals during 1986 to 2017 were selected as the research object and text formatting in the Web of Science (WOS) database is exported. Then inventory management knowledge mapping is done and clustering keywords are extracted by using CiteSpace and VOSviewer software. Based on co-word analysis, the three special clusters are exported: inventory optimization strategy, inventory pricing and inventory technology. Besides, the clustering structure and time evolution are analysed. Finally, bibliographic item co-occurrence matrix builder (BICOMB) was used to extract the “journal” and “researchers” keywords in the inventory management research fields. Setting three parameters such as the cited half-life, centrality, frequency and keywords for data mining, it can infer the trend keywords of future research.

Results showed that inventory management research has been abundant in literature over the past 30 years and has experienced a change from focusing on inventory optimization strategy to inventory pricing and inventory technology in process. It shows that inventory management research focused on the classic topics and includes economic order quantity, dynamic pricing, design and technology, and the new topics include channel coordination, hierarchical price and simulation.

Based on knowledge mapping, this study is still relatively macro and cannot cover all areas of inventory management. This study only investigated the state of correlational research in WOS and Google Trends and not additional databases.

The current research mainly builds on knowledge mapping for the research hotspot of inventory management and provides visual references for future research in this field.

The success of a supply chain is highly reliant on effective inventory and ordering decisions. This paper systematically reviews and analyzes the literature on inventory ordering decisions conducted using behavioral experiments to inform the state-of-the-art.

This paper presents the first systematic review of this literature. We systematically identify a body of 101 papers from an initial pool of over 12,000.

Extant literature and industry observations posit that decision makers often deviate from optimal ordering behavior prescribed by the quantitative models. Such deviations are often accompanied by excessive inventory costs and/or lost sales. Understanding how humans make inventory decisions is paramount to minimize the associated consequences. To address this, the field of behavioral operations management has produced a rich body of research on inventory decision-making using behavioral experiments. Our analysis identifies primary research clusters, summarizes key learnings and highlights opportunities for future research in this critical decision-making area.

The findings will have a significant impact on future research on behavioral inventory ordering decisions while informing practitioners to reach better ordering decisions.

Previous systematic reviews have explored behavioral operations broadly or its subdisciplines such as judgmental forecasting. This paper presents a systematic review that specifically investigates the state-of-the-art of inventory ordering decisions using behavioral experiments.

This paper aims to give a comprehensive review, summary, and discussion on inventory models that have appeared in the literature. During these past ten decades, no seminal paper reviewing the field of inventory lot sizing has even been published. This limitation has been identified in the literature by several researchers over the years, with the sheer volume of the number of published inventory lot sizing models acting as a factor which has limited a research endeavor to review the literature on inventory lot sizing models.

This article reviews research on inventory lot size models and provides a review of previously published literature review papers on inventory models. Based on this initial review, the literature extending current research practices on inventory modeling in supply chains and in sustainable practices is presented. Directions for expanding research in these two areas are examined in light of concerns expressed in the historical use of inventory models and in light of a new inventory research paradigm.

In our paper, we have adopted a novel strategy to overcome this limitation by focusing our review on a review of inventory lot sizing review papers.

By adopting the methodology of reviewing published inventory review papers, we can contribute a comprehensive review of the inventory lot sizing literature that serves to provide in one paper a consolidation of inventory research that can serve as a single source to keep researchers up to date with the research developments in inventory lot sizing models. We also identify gaps in the field which could stimulate new research agendas in the areas of supply chain management and sustainable inventory practices.

Lays a foundation for a comprehensive awareness and understanding of research in the area of international supply chain management. More specifically, reviews publications constituting a decade of the most recent research in the three areas of international purchasing, inventory management and logistics in 22 leading academic and practitioner journals for the period 1986 through 1995. Through classification and review of this literature, enables a better understanding of this vast field while simultaneously making available a valuable source of information for academicians and practitioners to draw from. Discusses key research findings, provides an overall assessment of the research in these areas and shapes an agenda for future research by identifying important gaps in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to review and analyze the perishable inventory models along various dimensions such as its evolution, scope, demand, shelf life, replenishment policy, modeling techniques and research gaps.

In total, 418 relevant and scholarly articles of various researchers and practitioners during 1990-2016 were reviewed. They were critically analyzed along author profile, nature of perishability, research contributions of different countries, publication along time, research methodologies adopted, etc. to draw fruitful conclusions. The future research for perishable inventory modeling was also discussed and suggested.

There are plethora of perishable inventory studies with divergent objectives and scope. Besides demand and perishable rate in perishable inventory models, other factors such as price discount, allow shortage or not, inflation, time value of money and so on were found to be combined to make it more realistic. The modeling of inventory systems with two or more perishable items is limited. The multi-echelon inventory with centralized decision and information sharing is acquiring lot of importance because of supply chain integration in the competitive market.

Only peer-reviewed journals and conference papers were analyzed, whereas the manuals, reports, white papers and blood-related articles were excluded. Clustering of literature revealed that future studies should focus on stochastic modeling.

Stress had been laid to identify future research gaps that will help in developing realistic models. The present work will form a guideline to choose the appropriate methodology(s) and mathematical technique(s) in different situations with perishable inventory.

The current review analyzed 419 research papers available in the literature on perishable inventory modeling to summarize its current status and identify its potential future directions. Also the future research gaps were uncovered. This systemic review is strongly felt to fill the gap in the perishable inventory literature and help in formulating effective strategies to design of an effective and efficient inventory management system for perishable items.

This research proposes a decision framework for using non-financial measures to define a replenishment policy for perishable health products. These products are perishable and substitutable by nature and create complexities for managing inventory. Instead of a financial measure, numerous measures should be considered and balanced to meet business objectives and enhance inventory management.

This research applies a multi-methodological approach and develops a framework that integrates discrete event simulation (DES), analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and data envelopment analysis (DEA) techniques to define the most favourable replenishment policy using non-financial measures.

The integration framework performs well as illustrated in the numerical example; outcomes from the framework are comparable to those generated using a traditional, financial measures-based, approach. This research demonstrates that it is feasible to adopt non-financial performance measures to define a replenishment policy and evaluate performance.

The framework, thus, prioritises non-financial measures and addresses issues of lacking information sharing and employee involvement to enhance hospitals' performance while minimising costs. The non-financial measures improve cross-functional communication while supporting simpler transformations from high-level strategies to daily operational targets.

This paper seeks to examine key factors within the control of store managers to optimizing inventory and store results.

This research integrates principles of action research and traditional research in a big box retail environment.

While this study confirms theories that link inventory to sales, merchandise selection, and technology, it emphasizes the role of people. Furthermore, it proves that different stores within same companies and different departments within same stores deliver different results due, mainly, to human factors – specifically, critical thinking, functional knowledge, and leadership.

This study does not address inventory assortment, space allocation, automatic replenishment, planograms design, technology, logistics, and other factors that may impact inventory but mostly outside the control of big box store managers.

This study proposes practical tools and ideas to optimizing inventory and business results in big‐box stores. It also serves as an example of extracting and verifying retail management theory from practice. As such, it benefits both practitioners and academics.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of inventory management articles published in major logistics outlets, identify themes from the literature and provide future direction for inventory management research to be published in logistics journals.

Articles published in major logistics articles, beginning in 1976, which contribute to the inventory management literature are reviewed and cataloged. The articles are segmented based on major themes extracted from the literature as well as key assumptions made by the particular inventory management model.

Two major themes are found to emerge from logistics research focused on inventory management. First, logistics researchers have focused considerable attention on integrating traditional logistics decisions, such as transportation and warehousing, with inventory management decisions, using traditional inventory control models. Second, logistics researchers have more recently focused on examining inventory management through collaborative models.

This paper catalogs the inventory management articles published in the major logistics journals, facilitates the awareness and appreciation of such work, and stands to guide future inventory management research by highlighting gaps and unexplored topics in the extant literature.

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.

Managing perishable inventories is a trade‐off of shortages and lost sales against wastage. This paper aims to identify what drives good management of perishables within the supply chain using the example of blood inventory management in hospitals.

Seven case studies with hospital transfusion laboratories in the UK blood supply chain were carried out in order to explore how perishable inventories are managed. The case studies identify drivers for good performance in perishable inventories.

Six recommendations are developed for how managers can improve perishable inventory performance. These are based around simple management procedures implemented by experienced staff. The case studies develop three propositions that recommend how inventory theory should be embedded in practice.

This research demonstrates that managerial changes and training issues have a significant impact on waste reduction and inventory management performance in perishable supply chains. However, as the case studies focus on the blood supply chain, some caution needs to be applied in generalising these findings beyond the specific context studied.

A multi‐disciplinary approach, combining awareness of the importance of the dynamics of the whole supply chain with good skill and experience, leads to new thinking, which enables staff to make better inventory decisions resulting in better performance and reduced wastage. Managerial changes and training are critical for good inventory performance.

Literature suggests that sophisticated and complex inventory models will drive performance; however, in practice a combination of basic well‐grounded inventory theory with simple management procedures carried out by experienced staff leads to better performance.