Inventory Auditing and Replenishment Using Point-of-Sales Data

Achal  Bassamboo; Antonio  Moreno; Ioannis  Stamatopoulos

Article | Production and Operations Management | May 2020

Inventory Auditing and Replenishment Using Point-of-Sales Data

by Achal Bassamboo, Antonio Moreno and Ioannis Stamatopoulos

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;

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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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Inventory Auditing and Replenishment Using Point-of-Sales Data

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