An AHP Based Approach for Multi-echelon Inventory System Selection: Case of Distribution Systems

Nowadays, inventory management is becoming more difficult as supply chains are complex and involve many facilities for different stages. The multi-echelon inventory management permits to the supply chains to be more competitive by an efficient control of inventories and a high responsiveness of the whole system. As there is no single exact inventory management policy, and there is a multitude of multi-level inventory models, the selection of the most suitable alternative is not easy. There's few previous research done concerning the selection phase of a multi-echelon inventory system in our knowledge. In this paper, we try to contribute in the literature by using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a multi-criteria decision making method (MCDM), that helps a Decision Maker (DM) to choose and select the appropriate multi-echelon inventory system. We focus in this research work on the case of distribution inventory systems. We apply this framework to the Moroccan public pharmaceutical supply chain.