Technological innovation in electronic inventory solutions:an analysis of patent data

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the technological development of electronic inventory solutions from perspective of patent analysis. We first applied the international patent classification to classify the top categories of data processing technologies and their corresponding top patenting countries. Then we identified the core technologies by the calculation of patent citation strength and standard deviation criterion for each patent. To eliminate those core innovations having no reference relationships with the other core patents, relevance strengths between core technologies were evaluated also. Our findings provide market intelligence not only for the research and development community, but for the decision making of advanced inventory solutions.

Non-stationary stochastic inventory lot-sizing with emission and service level constraints in a carbon cap-and-trade system

Firms worldwide are taking major initiatives to reduce the carbon footprint of their supply chains in response to the growing governmental and consumer pressures. In real life, these supply chains face stochastic and non-stationary demand but most of the studies on inventory lot-sizing problem with emission concerns consider deterministic demand. In this paper, we study the inventory lot-sizing problem under non-stationary stochastic demand condition with emission and cycle service level constraints considering carbon cap-and-trade regulatory mechanism. Using a mixed integer linear programming model, this paper aims to investigate the effects of emission parameters, product- and system-related features on the supply chain performance through extensive computational experiments to cover general type business settings and not a specific scenario. Results show that cycle service level and demand coefficient of variation have significant impacts on total cost and emission irrespective of level of demand variability while the impact of product's demand pattern is significant only at lower level of demand variability. Finally, results also show that increasing value of carbon price reduces total cost, total emission and total inventory and the scope of emission reduction by increasing carbon price is greater at higher levels of cycle service level and demand coefficient of variation. The analysis of results helps supply chain managers to take right decision in different demand and service level situations.