The modular assembly system can make it possible for the variety of products to be assembled in a short lead time. In this system, necessary components are assembled to optional components tailor to customers’ orders. Budget for inventory investments composed of inventory and purchasing costs are practically limited and the purchasing cost is often paid when an order is arrived. Service cost is assumed to be proportional to service level and it is included in budget constraint. We develop a heuristic procedure to find a good solution for a continuous review inventory system of the modular assembly system with a budget constraint. A regression analysis using a quadratic function based on the exponential function is applied to the cumulative density function of a normal distribution. With the regression result, an efficient heuristics is proposed by using an approximation for some complex functions that are composed of exponential functions only. A simple problem is introduced to illustrate the proposed heuristics.

We show how a supplier can peg cost measures to the reliability of his time guarantees via the penalty costs considered in the framework. The framework also enables us to study the connections between the logistics network and the market. In this context, we show that even when the market base increases significantly, the supplier can still use the logistics network designed to satisfy lower demand density, with only a marginal reduction in profit. Finally we show how the framework is useful to evaluate and compare various logistics system improvement strategies. The supplier can then easily choose the improvement strategy that increases his profit with the minimal increase in his logistics costs.