The company can use the idle time for either machine maintenance, the production
of other products, or to reduce the setup costs. For a single item perishable inventory
system, if there is no minimum stock requirement or the constant amount to be kept in the
system is relatively small, we can readily extend the traditional EMQ model to address the
perishability property of the stock by properly upper-bounding the EMQ cycle, to guarantee
that the entire inventory can be completely refreshed before it expires. However, when the
minimum inventory is comparable with the total regular market consumption during the
shelf-life, trivial extensions to the perishable inventory policy are no longer adequate. It is
therefore imperative to develop a new inventory policy specially geared to a system with
a high minimum volume requirement on top of the regular market demand, such as the
perishable VMI system for the SNS, to minimize the operational cost of maintaining such a
system.