The main focus of this study is to investigate the performance of a clark-scarf type multi-echelon serial supply chain operating with a base-stock policy and to optimize the inventory levels in the supply chains so as to minimize the systemwide total inventory cost, comprising holding and backorder costs as all the nodes in the supply chain. The source of supply of raw materials to the most upstream node, namely supplier, is assumed to have an infinite raw material availability. Retailer faces random customer demand, which is assumed to be stationary and normally distributed. If the demand exceeds on-hand inventory, the excess demand is backlogged. Using the echelon stock and demand quantile concepts and an efficient simulation technique, we derive near optimal inventory policy. Additionally we discuss the derived results through the extensive experiments for different supply chain settings.