The need of organizations to ensure service levels that impact on customer satisfaction has required the design of collaborative processes among stakeholders involved in inventory decision making. The increase of quantity and variety of items, on the one hand, and demand and customer expectations, on the other hand, are transformed into a greater complexity in inventory management, requiring effective communication and agreements between the leaders of the logistics processes. Traditionally, decision making in inventory management was based on approaches conditioned only by cost or sales volume. These approaches must be overcome by others that consider multiple criteria, involving several areas of the companies and taking into account the opinions of the stakeholders involved in these decisions. Inventory management becomes part of a complex system that involves stakeholders from different areas of the company, where each agent has limited information and where the cooperation between such agents is key for the system’s performance. In this paper, a distributed inventory control approach was used with the decisions allowing communication between the stakeholders and with a multicriteria group decision-making perspective. This work proposes a methodology that combines the analysis of the value chain and the AHP technique, in order to improve communication and the performance of the areas related to inventory management decision making. This methodology uses the areas of the value chain as a theoretical framework to identify the criteria necessary for the application of the AHP multicriteria group decision-making technique. These criteria were defined as indicators that measure the performance of the areas of the value chain related to inventory management and were used to classify ABC inventory of the products according to these selected criteria. Therefore, the methodology allows us to solve inventory management DDM based on multicriteria ABC classification and was validated in a Colombian company belonging to the graphic arts sector.

The current global situation due to the COVID-19 illness has seriously impacted the capacity of the supply chains to accomplish timely and in a reliable way the availability of essential biosafety products. Production and trading companies of biosafety products have experienced an unpredicted change in the product demand. This is due to the protocol international regulations from health organizations regarding the use of biosafety products and their use to mitigate the virus propagation. For the companies involved in these supply chains, their priority is to keep appropriate service levels in the current scenario, guaranteeing high availability at each echelon to help life´s preservation. It requires to maintain articulation and flexibilization of the processes in the supply chain, reflected in the decision making. In this world with high volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), where the traditional practices are no longer effective, rationality, people´s training, and the experience for the decision-making are essential.Nevertheless, despite the relevance of the problem, studies about business strategies of multiple product inventories and their impact on the service level and volatile demand during a pandemic is limited. This paper focuses on the experience of a Colombian Company of biosafety products. The key contribution of this proposal leads to some important insights for biosafety companies managing many highly demanded products, volatile behaviour, and very important items for containing the spread of a virus in a complex and dynamic market influenced by a global disruption of supply chains, in this case the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Los niveles de competitividad que la globalización impone a las empresas, les exige emplear herramientas para mejorar continuamente los niveles de productividad y eficiencia en sus procesos productivos. Dentro de la clasificación de desperdicios que afectan la productividad, destaca el tiempo como uno de los más incidentes, siendo el tiempo de respuesta, desde que el cliente coloca el pedido hasta que la empresa se lo entrega físicamente, un factor diferenciador entre un proveedor y otro, pues los clientes valoran la entrega oportuna como criterio prioritario. En empresas que trabajan bajo pedido y emplean sistema pull, el tiempo de cambios de referencias es un factor que incide directamente en el tiempo del ciclo, por lo que reducirlo, incidirá directamente en el nivel de servicio. Entre las causas más frecuentes que generan retrasos se encuentra la mano de obra y los métodos de trabajo pudiéndose reducir sus impactos con la participación de los operarios en el proceso de toma de decisiones. En este trabajo se muestra un modelo, que combina herramientas de Seis Sigma y Lean Manufacturing, con la simulación discreta y la priorización de actividades según procesos participativos soportados en métodos multicriteriales y se muestran los resultados de su aplicación en un caso real de una compañía de artes gráficas colombiana.

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