Abstract

The classic multi-item inventory model with space, number of inventory and monetary constraints were applied in this research to solve the Course Materials inventory management problem of the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN). The Kuhn-Tucker necessary and sufficient condition of determining optimum Economic Order Quantities (EOQ) which uses the Lagrange multiplier trial-and-error method was replaced in this work with a simple trimming method to speed up the process. Python programming was used to code the resultant model to give a flexible interface that will be easy to use by all users. Numerical illustrations were given for the three different models to validate the performance of the model on the test data. The trimming method used in this work was tested by comparing results obtained using the method with those obtained using the Lagrange trial-and-error method. When implemented, the proposed model will improve decision making in Course Material inventory management and reduce the difficulty encountered by staff in utilization of stored data for basic scientific analysis using manual computational processes.