Reordering strategies for a newsboy-type product

Abstract

This paper considers the very common situation in which a single-period 'newsboy' type product may be ordered or produced twice during a season/period. We show that the explicit consideration of this reorder opportunity makes the newsboy problem very much richer. The specific version considered in this paper allows a reorder during mid-season after the early-season demand has been observed, and this reorder arrives after a given lead time. The demand distributions during the various portions of the season may have very general distribution forms; also, the late-season and early-season demands may be dependent. Solution procedures are developed to find the best way to exploit this reorder opportunity, and our numerical solutions indicate that this reorder opportunity can improve profits considerably as long as the product's profit margin is not very high. Other real-world variations of this two-order newsboy problem are briefly discussed. © 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.