Managing premium wines using an (s- 1 , s) inventory policy: a heuristic solution approach

Mauricio Varas, Franco Basso, Armin Lüer-Villagra, Alejandro Mac Cawley, Sergio Maturana

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Operations research models are increasingly being used to support decision making in the wine industry. However, they have not yet been used to support inventory management decisions. In this paper, we develop a heuristic procedure for managing the stock of premium wines motivated by the operations of a small export-focused winery we worked with. Following an (s- 1 , s) inventory policy, we assume that the decision maker aims to minimize the steady-state expected values of work in process, overage, and underage costs. The developed heuristic is as follows. First, we approximate the dynamics of the labeling process by a group scheduling policy to obtain the mean delays for each labeled product. Then, we address the problem of setting the inventory positions for the whole product portfolio by solving one newsvendor-type problem for each end-product. We provide some theoretical insights, a numerical example, and we analyze the accuracy of our procedure.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)351-376
Number of pages26
JournalAnnals of Operations Research
Volume280
Issue number1-2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2019

Keywords

  • (s- 1 , s)
  • Inventory management
  • OR models
  • Wine industry

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Decision Sciences
  • Management Science and Operations Research

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