ROBUSTNESS OF ORDER RELIABILITY MODELS WITH APPLICATIONS TO ORDER AGING

We examine a simple inventory model that predicts order reliability, a customer service metric often used in supply chain inventory models. We discuss the early applications of this model to predict product ava ilability in make-to-stock systems and more recent applications of the model in make-to-order environments. We show how the model can be use d to create order ageing curves which describe service performance ove r time and graphically illustrate the implications of demand variabili ty on system performance. Through an extensive experimental investigat ion, we examine the robustness of this simple model and find that it p erforms well, even when the underlying assumptions of the model are vi olated.