Production or its investment of carton soft drink is relatively lower in cost than that of the canned, glass bottled, or plastic bottled soft drink. However, as the shelf life is shorter than other packaging systems, it is difficult to carry its inventory and then to produce daily by order. In particular, at the final batch in daily production, it is unavoidable to discard the excess drink over the minimum volume necessary for final one batch processing. Hence, this paper's research question is how some flexible before and behind shift of order timing can reduce such kinds of discard based on an agreement with the customer.A key phrase is 'Virtual Inventory' by flexible demand timing shift for a buffer between supply and demand without any physical inventory for discard reduction. The methodology to the above research questions is real options analysis for a flexible shift decision of demand timing. This paper's objective is to build a two-stage supply-chain model for call and put options for positive and negative daily production flexibility to ''real demand'', draw an option selection policy to each gap between supply and demand, apply a sensitivity analysis to find critical conditional and decision variables at a decision tree, and confirm the effectiveness of this scheme by using practical demand data. Thus, timing option can be considered as Virtual Inventory by its buffer function between supply and demand in daily demand production. The next challenge is smart and flexible risk management to uncertain demand with clear seasonal variation.
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