Abstract
This paper presents an integrated analysis of supply chain and financing decisions of multi-national corporation. We construct a model in which multiple currency storage units are installed to manage the currency flows associated with multi-national supply chain activities such as raw material procurement, process operation, inventory control, transportation and finished product sales. Core contribution of this study is to quantitatively investigate the influence of macroscopic economic factors such as exchange rates and taxes on operational decisions. The supply chain is modeled by the Process-Storage Network with recycle streams. The objective function of the optimization is minimizing the opportunity costs of annualized capital investments and currency/material inventories minus the benefit to stockholders interpreted by home currency. The major constraints of the optimization are that the material and currency storage units must not be depleted. A production and inventory analysis formulation, the periodic square wave (PSW) model, provides useful expressions for the upper/lower bounds and average levels of the currency and material inventory holdups. The expressions for the Kuhn-Tucker conditions of the optimization problem are reduced to a subproblem and analytical lot sizing equations. The procurement, production, transportation and financial transaction lot sizes can be determined by analytical expressions after the average flow rates are already known. We show that, when corporate income tax is taken into consideration, the optimal production lot and storage sizes are smaller than is the case when such factors are not considered typically by 20 %.