Marketing Channel Strategy
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. Inventories refer to stocks of goods or components used to make them, and they exist for several reasons: • Demand surges outstrip production capacity. To smooth production, facto- ries anticipate such surges and produce according to the forecast. Inventory results. The demand surge may be natural (e.g., ice cream in summer), or it may be due to marketers’ actions, such as short-term promotions. The disci- pline of supply chain management emerged in the grocery industry mainly because retailers stockpiled goods to take advantage of manufacturers’ promo- tions but then had to deal with high inventory carrying costs, including the cost of obsolescence. • Economies of scale exist in production and transportation. Inventory in this case results because firms batch-process orders to make a long production run or stockpile goods to fill containers, trucks, ships, or planes. • Transportation takes time, especially with greater distances between points of production and points of consumption. Downstream channel members thus maintain inventories (pipeline stock) to meet their demands until a shipment arrives and can be unpacked. CHANNEL BASICS 48 • Supply and demand are uncertain. Buyers can never be completely sure how long it will take to be resupplied (lead time)—or sometimes if they can get the stock at all. Thus, they acquire safety stock (i.e., excess of inventory, beyond the best estimate of what is needed during an order cycle) as a hedge against uncertainty. Such uncertainty often results from ignorance about what will sell (demand uncertainty). How much inventory a channel member should hold is a very difficult question. Many models in the operations research tradition attempt to answer it, and they vary mainly in the assumptions they use to render this inventory problem math- ematically tractable. The economic order quantity (EOQ) model is the oldest and likely the best known. 6 In marketing channels, tải về 5.39 Mb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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