A note on “quality improvement and setup reduction in the joint economic lot size model”

In a recent paper, Affisco et al. [J.F. Affisco, M.J. Paknejad, F. Nasri, Quality improvement and setup reduction in the joint economic lot size model, European Journal of Operations Research 142 (2002) 497–508] propose a quality-adjusted joint economic lot size model that considers investments in quality improvement and setup cost reduction. In particular, they consider a single-vendor, single-buyer, deterministic demand economic lot-sizing problem, and they investigate the potential impact of economic investments in the vendor’s quality improvement and setup cost reduction efforts on the system-wide costs. However, the particular form of the investment function that they use to represent the cost of investments in quality improvement does not represent actual practice in many industries. Hence, in this note, we develop modified models for quality improvement and simultaneous quality improvement and setup cost reduction using a modified form of the investment function. Our fundamental results and conclusions are substantially different than those in Affisco et al. (2002).