0000000000606801
AUTHOR
Jalal Ashayeri
Current economic downturn and supply chain: The significance of demand and inventory smoothing
The aim of this article is to analyse and quantify the effects of demand and inventory smoothing into supply-chain performance, facing the extreme volatility and impetuous alteration of the market produced by the current economic recession. To do so, we model a traditional serial three-stage supply chain and we test five settings of order smoothing under two shocks in the market demand, and we measure effects in terms of internal process benefits and customer service level of all supply chain partners. Results show that the implementation of this inventory strategy should be based on reward schemes; in fact a higher level of smoothing can generally improve the performance of the upstream st…
A Simulation Model of a Tandem Coordinated Supply Chain
This paper presents a study of a coordinated production inventory-system. In the proposed model, any echelon considers its successors as part of its inventory system and generates the replenishment order on the basis of operational information of its partners. We show that the coordinated decision making allows elimination of information distortion along the chain. Furthermore, we show how the bottom-up transmission of inefficiencies, typical of traditional supply chains, is avoided.