This is a 4-year Career Development proposal with focus on stochastic inventory systems and supply chain management. The research plan is organized into three areas. First, the PI will establish high performance heuristics for a class of multi-echelon stochastic inventory systems. Second, he intends to investigate the value of improving communication between members of a supply chain. The final part of the research plan involves issues of marketing-operations interface, specifically, channel coordination (analogous to supply-chain management but with independent firms), and product variety.