A supply chain is a system consisting of material suppliers, production facilities, distribution services, and customers who are all linked together via the downstream feed-forward flow of materials (deliveries) and the upstream feedback flow of information (orders), as shown in Fig. 1 (Stevens, 1989). In a traditional supply chain each “player” is responsible for his own inventory control and production or distribution ordering activities. One fundamental characteristic and problem that all players in a traditional supply chain (such as retailers, distributors, manufacturers, raw material suppliers) must solve is “just how much to order the production system to make (or the suppliers to supply) to enable a supply chain echelon to satisfy its customers’ demands”. This is the classic production/inventory control problem.