Coordination in a single-vendor multi-buyer supply chain by synchronizing delivery and production cycles

This paper proposes a coordinated single-vendor multi-buyer supply chain model by synchronizing delivery and production cycles. The synchronization is achieved by scheduling the actual delivery days of the buyers and coordinating them with the vendor's production cycle whilst allowing the buyers to choose their own lot sizes and order cycles. A mathematical model for our proposed coordination is developed and analyzed. The results of our three numerical examples show that the synchronized cycles policy works better than independent optimization as well as restricting buyers to adopt a common order cycle. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.