Controllable deterioration rate and green investment decisions in vendor-managed chemical product inventory supply chain relationship

Ventures are currently collaborating and forming supply chain relationships under specific strategies, such as a Vendor-Managed Inventory (VMI) system. In a VMI system, the vendor manages all inventory decisions instead of the buyer, enhancing supply chain clarity, reducing costs, and potentially improving its environmental sustainability. Our proposed research examines a two-level supply chain with a single vendor and a single buyer handling constantly deteriorating chemical products, such as ethylenediamine, diethyl oxalate, sodium borohydride, and zirconium tetrachloride, whose demand follows a time-dependent quadratic form. These products require proper preservation to minimize deterioration while also addressing the impact of carbon emissions from transportation as a contributor to climate change. Three cases are discussed for the VMI and non-VMI systems: ۱) green investment to reduce carbon emissions, ۲) preservation technology to reduce deterioration rates, and ۳) a combination of preservation technology and green investment to reduce both deterioration and carbon emissions. The objective is to minimize the total supply chain cost per unit time, considering the decision variables, and the classical optimization method used to derive the optimum solution of objective functions. An inventory cost analysis, both with and without VMI, demonstrates that the VMI system in our proposed model consistently reduces overall supply chain costs and outperforms the conventional approach. The findings indicate that the VMI system, when combined with preservation and green investments, incurs the lowest cost compared to other cases. Numerical examples and a sensitivity analysis are provided to validate the derived results.

کلیدواژه ها:

Vendor-managed inventory ، Single vendor-buyer ، chemicals ، Time dependent demand ، Deterioration ، carbon emissions ، Green investments ، Preservation technology