Balancing lost sales, waste and inventory holding costs for perishable products in a retailer setting – EyeOn 

 Overview

Company Description

We are EyeOn, innovative supply chain experts. We integrate consultancy, solutions and data science to help improve forecasting and planning processes for our customers. As a graduate intern, you will be part of our data science team. Within EyeOn data science, we help customers improve their planning decisions anywhere on the spectrum from quick-wins to industry-leading advanced data science projects.

Project Description

Retailer

Goals of the project

The goal of this project is to design and build a model that determines the optimal policy (or policies) to optimize profit of perishable (food) products (with very short shelf life) in a retailer setting with one store and stochastic demand for >1 products. The total costs consist of inventory holding costs and waste (or discounts) as a result of shelf life expires. The products can be substituted, i.e. in case of stockout customers may but not necessarily decide to buy the alternative product.

Research questions (for discussion):

• What is the optimal replenishment policy that maximizes total profit?
• What is the impact of the different variables on the optimal policy? (e.g. substitution, profit margin, waste)

Deliverables

Exact deliverables to be determined, but include:

• Model(s) implemented in our data science platform (Python code) 
• Master thesis 
• In-house knowledge sharing session 
• Support EyeOn-colleague hosting a webinar on the topic or writing a commercial blog post 
• Support writing scientific paper

Knowledge

• You already have (solid) programming skills and (basic) knowledge of inventory optimization.

 More information: escf@tue.nl