Decision Support System for Safety Stock and Safety Time Buffers in Multi-Item Single-Stage Industrial Supply Chains

Safety stock and safety time are two well-known stock buffering solutions of material requirements planning (MRP) processes to mitigate against supply and demand uncertainty. While the significance of proper inventory in managing change has been extensively researched, supply chain management research on safety period has gotten less attention. Earlier operations quantitative studies, in particular, have often evaluated the utilization of such stock buffers separately, rather than combined. Considering dynamic demands and stochastic timescales, the authors present the decision support system (DSS) that handle the efforts to integrate appropriate safety stock and safety time judgments at the system level in multi-item single-stage multi -supplier industrial supply chains. The DSS concept is formulated as a mixed bi-objective approach that optimizes upstream storage costs and -service levels at the same time, presenting decision-makers with alternative not dominated feasible solutions.