Inventory Management Under Disruption Risk

Inventory management models help determine policies for managing trade-offs between customer satisfaction and service cost. Initiatives like lean manufacturing, pooling, and postponement have been proven to be effective in mitigating the trade-offs by maintaining high levels of service while reducing system inventories. However, such initiatives reduce the buffers, exacerbating supply chain issues in the event of a disruption. We evaluate stocking decisions in the presence of operational disruptions caused by random events such as natural disasters or man-made disturbances. These disruptions represent different risks from those associated with demand uncertainties as they stop production flow and typically persist longer. Thus, operational disruptions can be much more devastating though their likelihood of occurrence may be low. Using stochastic simulation, we combine the newsvendor model capturing demand uncertainty costs with catastrophe models capturing disruption/recovery costs. We apply data analytics to the simulation outputs to obtain insights to manage inventory under disruption risk.