Another recent work of Towill et al. (Disney and Towill, 2003a; Dejonckheere et al.,
2003) showed that the bullwhip effect is not avoidable under order-up-to replenishment policy whatever forecasting method is used.
A general replenishment rule was proposed that avoids variance amplification and succeeds in generating smooth
ordering patterns.
A key difference between the proposed rule and the traditional order-to-up systems is that, in their proposed rule, net stock and order inventory discrepancies are only fractionally taken into account. Furthermore, they argued that
reducing production lead-times can lead to a reduction of the bullwhip effect.