Devising an inventory control system for an assembly line at Mainfreight

The replenishments to and inventory control of a buffer inventory of an assembly line are currently not efficient. The goal of this research is to devise an inventory control system for this buffer inventory. Several demand and inventory models have been studied by conducting a literature study. Poisson and logarithmic compound Poisson demand are assumed. The chosen inventory model is the periodic review stochastic coordinated multi-item inventory model of Fung, Ma & Lau (2001), which minimises the total expected costs of inventory control per week subject to service level constraints. Next to these demand and inventory models, three extensions are developed for the inventory control system, one of them being a buffer inventory capacity check. The proposed inventory control system is implemented in an Excel tool, which the company can use to do replenishments with. The improvement when the proposed inventory control system will be used to control the buffer inventory, is determined. The total costs of buffer inventory control are expected to be at least 8.39% lower, which is mainly achieved by reducing the number of replenishments from multiple times per week to once every two weeks.