LITERATURE REVIEW ON INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

Introduction

Inventory management is controlling and tracking of business inventories and how goods flow

from purchase up to sale. It controls on how goods are manufactured, purchased, stored and sold.

This paper focuses on reviewing existing literatures on inventory management which helps in

analyzing and capturing conceptualized researches based on inventory management under

humanitarian supply chains. It also contains a summary of critical points and findings as well as

methodological and theoretical contributions of previous literatures on supply chains.

In humanitarian supply chains main questions arising from the research are how much the

quantity and quality of goods to order, the best time to order goods and where the goods should

be stored. However, in recent years disasters have been affecting procurement, inventory

management, warehousing, and transportation and distribution functions in supply chains.

This has attracted many researchers to carry an operation research and then several literatures

have been published to examine the existence of management disasters. This review focuses on

analysis of humanitarian inventory which mostly affects the responsiveness and efficiency of

humanitarian supply chains this literature focuses to answer these questions commercially on

supply chains. The following is a summary of distinct features which should be addressed by this

literature based on humanitarian inventories.

The overall objective includes improving both inventory costs and customer services which are

important for both business enterprises and humanitarian organizations. The utmost objective is

to improve efficiency in humanitarian organizations and commercially on inventory

management. On demand, there are also challenges including high uncertainty levels which are

linked with location, timing, amount and type of demand in humanitarians set up. In commercial
setting, network infrastructure is reliable but it may be damaged and affected by disasters and

this may prevent organizations from using modern technology to manage and track inventories.

This paper provides a systematic preview of articles analytical models for managing inventories

in humanitarian, it examines the articles which involves decisions on inventory management

such as where, when and how to stock whereby these decisions may be used in different aspects

to manage several disaster in inventory management. In this article also characteristics of

different models used in pre-disaster and post-disasters are reviewed while focusing on routine

models and network distribution design under humanitarian relief.

Section two in this literature review presents the methodology used to gather raw data, section

three provides articles body on findings, analysis on disaster in inventory management and

finally ends with identifying research gaps and then concludes the whole article with

recommendations for future research.

Past literature surveys on inventory management

This section provides a brief overview on literature surveys articles on inventory management in

humanitarian supply chains. This study is related to survey articles in disaster management and it

focuses on specifying problems in the cycle of managing disasters to help in humanitarian

operations. The table 1 below shows different articles written by different researchers due to

address the issue of inventory management in supply chains. From the table, in 2008 band 2015

there are high rise in articles researching on the issue. The studies presented mathematical

modules for examining the problems and relief distribution on different disasters. From the

surveys it was observed that most of surveys focused on distribution which includes sourcing,

transportation and resource allocation, pre-positioning and evacuation problems in disaster

management.
Table 1: y axis represent the number of articles verses the years in x axis

0
2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

Conclusions and research gaps

This review provides a depth analysis of different approaches developed for management of

humanitarian inventories. It gives research gaps from existing and established inventory

literatures on inventory management addressing questions on where, when and the quantity to

store within commercial inventory supply chains. Existing policies and models cannot be applied

directly to address and manage management inventories. This has raised recent research

literatures to manage these issues recently. This literature examines and addresses different

models and policies developed from adverse settings on humanitarian inventories. To identify

literatures that mainly focus on managing inventories, a further research is done from known and

established research databases using different combinations on disaster management and

planning. The paper is classified on planning phase and analysis of papers that focuses on

management, preparedness and response to disaster management on inventories. It is found that

planning literatures on inventory management presents several approaches determining the

location and the quantity of inventory for storage before disaster prevails in order to deliver

various supplies to mostly affected regions. According to the research, it is also found that post

disaster planning on inventory management literatures addresses a wide disaster types including

inventory policies and problem setting where several research gaps emerge for future directions

of research on inventory management. One of research gap emerging from previous literature

researches is that only few based researches focused on repositioning supplies for operations in

humanitarian inventories. A recommendation comes out that investigating implications while

putting into consideration adverse problem objectives, aspects and do a wider comparison of

solutions to different modeling based approaches on several sets of benchmark data. To see on

how/whether stocking inventory amounts and locations are affected by adverse equity objectives

would be of more significance. According to the literature review there are some problems which

are put into consideration by some studies and several are ignored such as capacitated facilities,

multiple items, varying lead times, additional tied facilities or different item costs. The questions

emerging from there are different or even some essential aspects to determine prepositioned

levels of inventory for operating in humanitarian inventory management and whether problem

standards can be speculated for adverse disaster types. The review recommends that it would be

valuable to create and come up with a clear benchmarking case data for study different sets to

test several approaches set and proposed for inventory planning under disaster management. It is

observed that different researchers spend more time and effort to analyze and process historical

raw data from different databases to identify a research gap in order to illustrate their own

approaches. Researchers are observed to use different analytical methods while making several

assumptions to develop a scenario under disaster management and then they associate different
probabilities to the given research scenarios and in this case if they have used the same data,

wide instances are generally generated. Future initiatives to generate several set of instances that

at most focus on differed supply humanitarian networks such country or global would even be of

more significance. This generally would allow interested researchers to weigh solutions from

several modeling approaches with link to standard humanitarian management inventories pre-

positioning, data sets, and post-warning. Another gap existing in existing literatures is on

unsatisfied demand. Most of research models impalement approach such as lost sale while others

adopt backordering approach. A recommendation for that is further analysis on items

backordered can be executed in inventory humanitarian management relief efforts. However the

research gap is that researchers should reconsider incorporating various deprivation costs./