After decades of development, multi-echelon inventory theory lays the foundation for supply-chain inventory management, and is playing an important role in today's increasingly active supply chain management research. This dissertation aims to make the theory more transparent and easier to implement. We develop simple, and surprisingly good, closed-form approximations for the optimal inventory policy parameters in serial supply chains. These approximate solutions can be easily obtained by simple spreadsheet calculations. The closed-form expressions of the solutions also provide the guidance on various managerial issues, such as stock positioning, resource allocation, and supply chain coordination.
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