管科系系列讲座第164期预告

时间：2016年6月23日（周二）13:00

地点：史带楼303

主持人: 徐以汎教授

演讲嘉宾：Yong-pin Zhou, Michael G. Foster School of Business, University of Washington

Title：Store Fulfillment Strategies for an Omni-Channel Retailer

Abstract：In this paper, we study the fulfillment strategies of an omni-channel retailer that would like to leverage its established offline retail channel infrastructure to help its online sales. We consider a single newsvendor-type product that is sold in both online and offline channels to non-overlapping markets with independent Poisson demand. The offline store can fulfill online demand at an additional handling and fulfillment cost, k, but not vice versa. The retailer makes decisions at three different levels: 1) at the strategic level the retailer must establish a fulfillment structure between the two channels in terms of where to stock inventory in the two channels, 2) at the tactical level, the retailer decides how much inventory to have for each channel before the season starts, 3) at the operational level throughout the season, as demand unfolds and inventory depletes, the retailer makes rationing decision about whether to use offline inventory to fill online order at any moment. We build separate and integrated models to study these decisions, and find that the optimal rationing decision has a threshold-based structure that depends critically on k and the mix of demand between the two channels. Two simple rationing heuristics are proposed and shown to be effective. Furthermore, integrating the rationing policy into higher-level decisions, we show that it can have significant impact on the retailer’s stocking and fulfillment structure decisions. We will also discuss various practical implications of our findings.
 

管理科学系

2016-6-12