Supply chain management (SCM) is an area that has recently received a great deal of attention in the business community. While SCM is relatively new, the idea of coordinated planning is not. During the last decades, many researchers have investigated multi-stage inventory problems. However, only a few papers address the problem of cost-optimal coordination of multi-stage inventory control with respect to service measures. Even published approaches have a shortcoming in dealing with a delivery lead time consisted of a shipping time and a waiting time. Assumed that there is no waiting time, or that the delivery lead time is implicitly compounded of a shipping time and a waiting time, the problem is often simplified into a multi-stage buffer allocation and a single-stage stochastic buffer sizing problem at all installations. This paper presents a simulation-based heuristic algorithm and a comparison with others for the problem that cannot be decomposed into a multi-stage buffer allocation and a single-stage stochastic buffer sizing problem because the waiting time ties together all stages. The comparison shows that the simulation-based heuristic algorithm performs better than other approaches in saving average inventory cost for both Poisson and Normal demands.