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  • May 2020
  • Article
  • Production and Operations Management

Inventory Auditing and Replenishment Using Point-of-Sales Data

By: Achal Bassamboo, Antonio Moreno and Ioannis Stamatopoulos
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Abstract

Spoilage, expiration, damage due to employee/customer handling, employee theft, and customer shoplifting usually are not reflected in inventory records. As a result, records often report phantom inventory, i.e., units of good not available for sale. We derive an optimal polynomial-time algorithm for the auditing and replenishment problem with phantom inventory, under the assumption that inventory is known immediately after replenishment. Moreover, we numerically show that a projected service-level threshold policy performs comparably to the optimal.

Keywords

Shelf Availability; Inventory Record Inaccuracy; Optimal Replenishment; Retail Analytics; Performance Effectiveness; Analysis; Mathematical Methods

Citation

Bassamboo, Achal, Antonio Moreno, and Ioannis Stamatopoulos. "Inventory Auditing and Replenishment Using Point-of-Sales Data." Production and Operations Management 29, no. 5 (May 2020): 1219–1231.
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About The Author

Antonio Moreno

Technology and Operations Management
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More from the Authors
  • Algorithmic Assortment Curation: An Empirical Study of Buybox in Online Marketplaces By: Santiago Gallino, Nil Karacaoglu and Antonio Moreno
  • Zalando: Becoming the Starting Point for Fashion By: Antonio Moreno, Leela Nageswaran, Emilie Billaud and Federica Gabrieli
  • Worten Portugal: Becoming a Digital Marketplace By: Antonio Moreno, Pedro Amorim and Tonia Labruyere
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