Volume 3 Issue 3 pp. 337-346 Spring, 2012


Performance analysis of supply chains under customer demand information sharing using role play game


T. Chinna Pamulety and V. Madhusudanan Pillai


Supply chain is a network of organizations that work together and performs various business functions such as procurement of raw materials, converting the raw material into semi-finished or finished goods and distributing the same to their ultimate customers. Presence of bullwhip effect in a supply chain is costly and degrades the performance of the supply chain. Reduction in bullwhip effect can improve the efficiency or profitability of a supply chain. The objective of this paper is to know the impact of imperfect Advance Demand Information (ADI) sharing on bullwhip effect in a four-stage serial supply chain and to evaluate the supply chain performance by conducting an experiment similar to the beer distribution game. The performance measures used are variance of orders placed by each stage, fill rate, total inventory at each stage and total holding cost of the supply chain. Results show that imperfect ADI improves the performance of the supply chain. The performance of the supply chain is also evaluated under order up to level (R, S) policy with safety stock and it is found that the performance of supply chain is better when inventory policy used.


DOI: 10.5267/j.ijiec.2012.02.002

Keywords: Supply Chain, Bullwhip Effect, Imperfect ADI, (R, S) Policy

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