In the modern supplier–customer relationship, Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) is used to monitor the customer's inventory replenishment. Despite the large amount of literature on the subject, it is difficult to clearly define VMI and the main associated processes. Beyond the short-term pull system inventory replenishment often studied in academic works, partners have to share their vision of the demand, their requirements and their constraints in order to fix shared objectives for the medium/long-term. In other words, the integration of VMI implies consequences for the collaborative process that links each partner's different planning processes. In this article we propose a literature review of VMI. Based on the conceptual elements extracted from this analysis, we suggest a VMI macro-process that summarises both operational and collaborative elements of VMI.

Fuzzy project scheduling has interested several researchers in the past two decades; about 20 articles have been written on this issue. Contrary to stochastic project-scheduling approaches that are used by many project schedulers, and even if the axiomatic associated to the theory of probabilities is not always compatible with decision-making situations, fuzzy project-scheduling approaches that are most suited to these situations have been kept in the academic sphere. This paper starts by recalling the differences one can observe between uncertainty and imprecision. Then most of the published research works that have been done in this field are summarized. Finally, a framework for addressing the resource-constrained fuzzy project-scheduling problem is proposed. This framework uses temporal linguistic descriptors, which might become very interesting features to the project-scheduling practitioners.