This paper considers a periodic review, two-echelon inventory system with one central warehouse and several re-tailers facing normally distributed demand. The goal is to attain target fill rates, while the systemwide total holding costs are minimized. An important aspect of this problem is material rationing in the case of shortages. If a central warehouse has insufficient inventory to deliver all replenishment orders to retailers, all order quantities are should be adjusted according to some rationing rule. A simple but efficient rationing rule is proposed and compared with the Balanced Stock (BS) rationing as introduced by Heijden which is known to be the best rationing policy in the literature. Numerical results show that the proposed rationing rule is more cost effective than BS rationing, especially for the differences in holding costs between retailers are large.