Admittedly, Pieter van der Vlist's thesis (published in June of 2007) was a bit of a shock to my system. After all, he's suggesting a retail supply chain where:

1) Retailers synchronize their buying to match the manufacturing schedule.
2) Retailers hold ALL of the supply chain inventory and manufacturers hold NONE.
3) Retailers forward position the lion's share of their inventory to the store.

While this approach seems to fly in the face of ECR principles, according to Dr. van der Vlist, the real savings in the retail supply chain will be achieved by minimizing handling, reducing time pressure and greatly increasing consolidation - not by reducing individual inventory pools.

Obviously, a model of this nature would require a complete rethink of the financial relationships between retailers and their suppliers (he devotes an entire chapter to this topic alone) and would require a critical mass of large retailers to adopt it in order to achieve the economies of scale - but if he's right the savings could be well worth it.

Particularly interesting is his discussion of a new transportation network called "The Carousel".

Click here to read the abstract - the link to the download is at the bottom of the page.