INVENTORY MANAGEMENT SIMULATION: AN APPLICATION TO A MANUFACTURING PLANT

The focus of this paper is the inventory management problem within an industrial plant devoted to manufacture high pressure hydraulic hoses. The authors propose to investigate and compare the behaviour of different inventory control policies (based on continuous review and review period) under the effect of different demand intensity, variability and lead times values. To this end the authors implement and integrate two simulation models capable of recreating the whole complexity of the industrial plant and its supply chain. After some preliminary analysis (for simulation models verification, validation and simulation run length calculation), the authors carry out a comprehensive set of simulation experiments investigating the inventory control policies behaviour in three different scenarios