The crisis of distribution is one of the longest standing and complicated issues facing human society. Imbued with social, political, historic, and cultural elements, it varies significantly across different countries as a result of all these factors. As an emerging economy which transferred from a planned to a market economy, China has experienced large distribution gaps since it implemented the Reform and Opening-up Policy in the early 1980s, requiring stronger economic law to mitigate and regulate the crisis of distribution. The two volumes examine the crisis of distribution that China faces and proposes policy and economic law methods that can be used to overcome the distribution dilemma. The author discusses the four main concepts and focus points of the crisis of distribution - distribution itself, the crises it faces, the rule of law and development before proposing a theoretical framework of "system-distribution-development" to resolve distribution problems that China faces. The book should be of keen interest to researchers and students of law, economics, and political science.

A perishable item is one that has constant utility up until an expiration date (which may be known or uncertain), at which point the utility drops to zero. This includes many types of packaged foods such as milk, cheese, processed meats, and canned goods. It also includes virtually all pharmaceuticals and photographic film, as well as whole blood supplies. This book is the first devoted solely to perishable inventory systems.
The book's ten chapters first cover the preliminaries of periodic review versus continuous review and look at a one-period newsvendor perishable inventory model. The author moves to the basic multiperiod dynamic model, and then considers the extensions of random lifetime, inclusion of a set-up cost, and multiproduct models of perishables. A chapter on continuous review models looks at one-for-one policies, models with zero lead time, optimal policies with positive lead time, and an alternative approach.
Additional chapters present material on approximate order policies, inventory depletion management, and deterministic models, including the basic EOQ model with perishability and the dynamic deterministic model with perishability. Finally, chapters explore decaying inventories, queues with impatient customers, and blood bank inventory control.
Anyone researching perishable inventory systems will find much to work with here. Practitioners and consultants will also now have a single well-referenced source of up-to-date information to work with."

This book describes the methods used to forecast the demands at inventory holding locations. The methods are proven, practical and doable for most applications, and pertain to demand patterns that are horizontal, trending, seasonal, promotion and multi-sku. The forecasting methods include regression, moving averages, discounting, smoothing, two-stage forecasts, dampening forecasts, advance demand forecasts, initial forecasts, all time forecasts, top-down, bottom-up, raw and integer forecasts, Also described are demand history, demand profile, forecast error, coefficient of variation, forecast sensitivity and filtering outliers. The book shows how the forecasts with the standard normal, partial normal and truncated normal distributions are used to generate the safety stock for the availability and the percent fill customer service methods. The material presents topics that people want and should know in the work place. The presentation is easy to read for students and practitioners; there is little need to delve into difficult mathematical relationships, and numerical examples are presented throughout to guide the reader on applications. Practitioners will be able to apply the methods learned to the systems in their locations, and the typical worker will want the book on their bookshelf for reference. The potential market is vast. It includes everyone in professional organizations like APICS, DSI and INFORMS; MBA graduates, people in industry, and students in management science, business and industrial engineering.

"Zero Inventories" is the definitive work on JIT! It is written for the key people in industry - managers, engineers, staff professionals and foremen, showing how to solve inventory problems and achieve stockless production. Its wide range of topics include: forecasting and inventory control methods; material requirements planning; systems for scheduling operations in manufacturing, procurement, logistics and project planning; systems for master scheduling and corporate planning; organizational problems of installing and managing new systems.

The book provides an introduction to logistics and supply chain management and the application of evolutionary computation, focusing on specific fields related to supply chain issues, from strategic sourcing decisions, and production planning and control to inventory to logistics and its application using evolutionary / heuristics techniques. Bridging the gap between management research, decision-making and computer analysis, this interdisciplinary book features state-of-the-art descriptions of the corresponding problems and advanced methods for solving them.

The book describes the application of hierarchical planning techniques to all the major functional areas of supply chain planning, including production, distribution, warehousing, transportation, inventory management, forecasting and performance management. In particular, the book provides a comprehensive review and understanding of how hierarchical planning techniques and principles can contribute to the effective and efficient management and planning of supply chain activities. The book begins with a review of some well-known, original hierarchical production planning techniques and implementations dating back several decades. Building on this historical base, it then reviews numerous more current hierarchical planning methods and applications covering a wide array of supply chain activities. Additionally, the book offers a number of new and original hierarchical planning techniques and algorithms covering different components of supply chain planning. These algorithms range from simple algebraic calculations to mathematical optimization models. The book also offers an original approach to hierarchical supply chain performance measurement and monitoring techniques. It further offers an original approach for integrating supply chain performance measurements into measurement systems such as the balanced scorecard which evaluate total firm performance. The book is written to cover the interests of a wide variety of audiences ranging from private industry practitioners, to academic researchers, to students of operations, logistics and supply chain management and planning. It features numerous graphical illustrations highlighting both methods and requirements for integrated hierarchical supply chain planning.

This book focuses on guidelines for reducing the energy consumption in warehousing processes. It presents a model of formal assessment for energy consumption in the context of storage-system logistics, as well as a computational model consisting of three sub-models: energy consumption models for forklifts and stacker cranes, respectively, and an energy intensity model for roller conveyors. The concept model is based on the assumption that the unit load is received at a zero-energy warehouse. Subsequent handling, transport and storage processes, in which the unit load is moved vertically and horizontally through the system, equate to changes in energy intensity within the logistics warehouse management system. Energy recovery based on the handling equipment used can be collected in batteries. The evaluation method takes into account the intensity of the energy supplied to the logistics system and reduces the storage of the recovered energy - this figure represents the energy needed to pass through the logistics unit load storage system, and can be expressed in an energy intensity map.

Logistic problems can rarely be solved satisfyingly within one single scientific discipline. This cross-sectional character is taken into account by the Research Cluster for Dynamics in Logistics with a combination of economical, information and production technical and enterprise-oriented research approaches. In doing so, the interdisciplinary cooperation between university, research institutes and enterprises for the solution of logistic problems is encouraged.

This book comprises the edited proceedings of the first International Conference on Dynamics in Logistics LDIC 2007. The scope of the conference was concerned with the identification, analysis, and description of the dynamics of logistic processes and networks. The spectrum reached from the planning and modelling of processes over innovative methods like autonomous control and knowledge management to the new technologies provided by radio frequency identification, mobile communication, and networking.

Two invited papers and of 42 contributed papers on various subjects give an state-of-art overview on dynamics in logistics. They include routing in dynamic logistic networks, RFID in logistics and manufacturing networks, supply chain control policies, sustainable collaboration, knowledge management and service models in logistics, container logistics, autonomous control in logistics, and logistic process modelling.

The 2022 edition of Rules and Guidance for Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Distributors, known as 'The Orange Guide', is the essential reference for all manufacturers and distributors of medicines in the UK.It provides you with a single authoritative source of European and UK guidance, information and UK legislation relating to the manufacture and distribution of human medicines, active substances, and brokering medicines.The new 11th edition has been updated to incorporate changes made after the UK's exit from the European Union on the 31st January 2020

MRP II: Planning for Manufacturing Excellence, an authoritative and insightful text, explores and defines the principles of Manufacturing Resource Planning methodology. It describes how the manufacturer can utilize and institute these principles effectively for maximum profit. Written from a user's viewpoint, the author presents MRP II as a planning tool used to achieve successful execution in differing manufacturing environments. The text features extensive end-of-chapter case studies, chapter quizzes, and their solutions as well as a glossary of terms. It also includes specific goals for manufacturing environments such as short lead times, reduced work-in-process, and flexibility to demand. In addition, detailed explanations of recent approaches to both infinite and finite scheduling are examined as well as execution concepts for processes, ranging from continuous synchronized process flow to nonsynchronized interrupted flow. Designed to provide readers with the principles of MRP II as well as its application to planning and manufacturing execution, this essential guide fulfills the training needs of manufacturing personnel and community college students. It is also a useful resource for material and manufacturing practitioners who require in-depth knowledge of MRP II or those who use it as a reference book to assist in The American Production and Inventory Control Society (APICS) certification.

These proceedings contain research presented at the 6th International Conference on Dynamics in Logistics, held in February 2018.The integration of dynamics within the modeling, planning and control of logistic processes and networks has shown to contribute massively to the improvement of the latter. Moreover, diversification of markets and demand has increased both the complexity and the dynamic changes of problems within the area of logistics. To cope with these challenges, it must become possible to identify, describe and analyze such process changes. Moreover, logistic processes and networks must be revised to be rapidly and flexibly adaptable to continuously changing conditions. This book presents new ideas to solve such problems, offering technological, algorithmic and conceptual improvements. It primarily addresses researchers and practitioners in the field of industrial engineering and logistics.

Decision Criteria and Optimal Inventory Processes provides a theoretical and practical introduction to decision criteria and inventory processes. Inventory theory is presented by focusing on the analysis and processes underlying decision criteria. Included are many state-of-the-art criterion models as background material. These models are extended to the authors' newly developed fuzzy criterion models which constitute a general framework for the study of stochastic inventory models with special focus on the real world inventory theoretic reservoir operations problems. The applications of fuzzy criterion dynamic programming models are illustrated by reservoir operations including the integrated network of reservoir operation and the open inventory network problems. An interesting feature of this book is the special attention it pays to the analysis of some theoretical and applied aspects of fuzzy criteria and dynamic fuzzy criterion models, thus opening up a new way of injecting the much-needed type of non-cost, intuitive, and easy-to-use methods into multi-stage inventory processes. This is accomplished by constructing and optimizing the fuzzy criterion models developed for inventory processes. Practitioners in operations research, management science, and engineering will find numerous new ideas and strategies for modeling real world multi- stage inventory problems, and researchers and applied mathematicians will find this work a stimulating and useful reference.

With the pressure of time-based competition increasing, and customers demanding faster service, the availability of service parts becomes a critical component of manufacturing and servicing operations. Potentially, the aftermarket service industry may account for 25% of a manufacturer s annual revenue. On the other hand, keeping too many of such spare parts increases operational costs and eats up the bottom line. The challenge is the erratic demand patterns of service parts. Demand commonly is intermittent with some time periods having no demand at all. Forecasting for intermittent demand itself has long been recognized, in the academic literature, as a very difficult business task. It is not only the variability of the demand size but also the variability of the demand pattern that makes intermittent demand so difficult to forecast. Hence management of service parts is a significant organizational problem. Therefore, small improvements in a company s system, regarding service parts, may be translated to substantial cost savings.

Service Parts Management provides an overview and detailed treatment of the current state of the research available on the forecasting and inventory management of items with intermittent demand. The book is divided into two parts, one for demand forecasting and one for inventory control. Demand forecasting techniques are presented for parametric and nonparametric approaches. Error measures, distributional assumptions, and the effects of correlation are all examined in the forecasting context while inventory control is examined in the continuous and periodic review cases. Multi echelon cases and inventory pooling are also considered.

An excellent reference for key concepts and a leading resource for further research, Service Parts Management guides researchers and practitioners in finding better management solutions to their problems."

Most books on inventory theory use the item approach to determine stock levels, ignoring the impact of unit cost, echelon location, and hardware indenture. Optimal Inventory Modeling of Systems is the first book to take the system approach to inventory modeling. The result has been dramatic reductions in the resources to operate many systems - fleets of aircraft, ships, telecommunications networks, electric utilities, and the space station.

Although only four chapters and appendices are totally new in this edition, extensive revisions have been made in all chapters, adding numerous worked-out examples. Many new applications have been added including commercial airlines, experience gained during Desert Storm, and adoption of the Windows interface as a standard for personal computer models.

Good operations and supply chain management practices are essential for the existence of both private and public organisations offering goods or rendering services. These practices are subject to volatile changes in markets due to global developments and hence it is important to understand the drivers of change to be able to respond adequately. Trends in operations and supply chain management covers a number of these drivers within the realm of operations and the supply chains serving businesses, so that the reader is equipped to respond with robustness in the changing environment.

The book covers the topics from a practical perspective and shares many case studies and examples to take the reader on a logical path of understanding the trends in operations and supply chain management and the importance of the drivers of change while sharing practical advice and solutions for the global industry.

The contents include the following:

• Green purchasing fundamentals
• Design for the environment
• Environmental accounting and environmental economics
• Sustainable operations and supply chain management
• Food security
• Digital technologies and operations in the fourth industrial revolution
• Maritime logistics
• Construction supply chain

Trends in operations and supply chain management is aimed at undergraduate students as well as professionals working in industry to support the sustainable business practices and goals of their organisations.