An alternative heuristic solution technique for efficient management of the serial supply chain

The serial supply chain management has received considerable attention in the literature. A few years back, the literature had been enriched by the presentation of serial supply chain models, both for single and sequence dependent multicomponent supply chain management, and their heuristic solution procedures. This paper demonstrates that the sequencing rule applied to select the appropriate sequence of products in determining minimal total cost does not meet the purpose. In addition, it finds that though the author presented generalised models, the solution procedures are restricted to a particular case. In this paper, the models are reorganised and alternative generalised heuristic solution procedures are presented so that they can never be worse than the original one. Then, we carry out a comparative study of our methods with the original ones on two numerical problems (illustrated in the original paper) to show cost reductions with reduced cycle times by our method.