Title: A note on the stochastic nature of lead times in multi-echelon supply chains

Authors: Peter Nielsen; Zbigniew Michna; Subrata Saha

Addresses: Department of Materials and Production, Aalborg University, DK 9220 Aalborg, East, Denmark ' Department of Mathematics and Cybernetics, Wrocław University of Economics, Poland ' Department of Materials and Production, Aalborg University, DK 9220 Aalborg, East, Denmark

Abstract: Recent supply chain research has concluded that stochastic lead times are a significant source of bullwhip effect in reorder-based supply chains. Despite this, the study of lead times and their nature has received remarkably little attention in literature. In this research we prove there exists an interdependency between lead time and service level measure, and thus the magnitude of the bullwhip effect. In a multi-echelon supply chain setting, the decision maker can experience disproportionate bullwhip effect. One cause of this is the fact that lead time distribution may likely stem from skewed and peaked distributions. As a member of a multi-echelon supply chain, a firm can experience an order variance that depend on the total number of echelon and information about their lead-time dependencies. These results correspond well with the few contributions found in literature showing actual lead times.

Keywords: stochastic lead times; bullwhip effect; supply chain.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLSM.2020.108695

International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management, 2020 Vol.36 No.3, pp.399 - 413

Received: 09 Oct 2018
Accepted: 14 Nov 2018
Published online: 27 Jul 2020 *

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