The Impact of Nonconforming Items on (s, S) Inventory Model with Customer Order Reservation and Cancellation

Abstract. The ultimate goal of inventory management is to decide the timing and the quantity of ordering in response to uncertain demands. Recently, some researchers have focused upon an impact of distortions in the information, e.g., customer order cancellation, on an economical inventory policy. The customer order cancel-lation is considered a kind of distortions in demands, because a demand that is eventually cancelled is equivalent to a phony demand. Also, there are some additional distortions in the inventory information. For instance, the procurement of suppliers may include some nonconforming items as a result of imperfect production and inspection by the suppliers, and/or damage in transit. The nonconforming item should be considered a kind of distortions in the inventory information, because the nonconforming item is equivalent to a phony stock. In this article, we consider an inventory model under the situation that customers can cancel their orders and the procurement of suppliers may include some nonconforming items. Then, we introduce the customer order re-servation into the inventory model for the purpose of avoiding the costly backlogs, because the customer order reservation gives retailers a period to fulfill customer’s requests. We formulate a periodic review (s, S) inventory model and investigate the economical operation under the situation mentioned above. Further, through the sensitivity analysis, we show the impact of these distortions and the effect of the customer order reservation on the inventory policy