Title: Effect of information sharing on the performance of a four stage serial supply chain under back order and lost sale situations

Authors: C.K. Ambilikumar; M. Bhasi; G. Madhu

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Government Engineering College, Engineering College P., Thrissur-680009, Kerala, India ' School of Management Studies, Cochin University of Science and Technology, Cochin-22, Kerala, India ' School of Engineering, Cochin University of Science and Technology, Cochin-22, Kerala, India

Abstract: In any supply chain (SC) system, information sharing is very important as it supports other SC drivers to enhance coordination and it thereby improves the performance of the entire SC. The objective of this study is to analyse the performance of a four level serial SC under eight different kinds of information sharing cases, with backorder and lost sales situations. The study has been done using experiments on SC simulation game software called 'SC role play game'. Steady state results from the game under different cases have been used to understand the behaviour under different information sharing cases. The data generated under different cases were subjected to statistical analysis to check for significant impact on performance between cases. The results show that the 'traditional' way of information sharing produces least performance and 'demand and SC performance' information sharing provides best performance for the SC under both backorder and lost sales situations. It is also seen that the performance improvement with better information sharing is more in the case of lost sales situation compared to backorder situation.

Keywords: supply chain management; SCM; simulation; information sharing; supply chain performance; backorders; lost sales; serial supply chains; role play games.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSCIM.2016.076407

International Journal of Supply Chain and Inventory Management, 2016 Vol.1 No.2, pp.91 - 117

Received: 05 Mar 2014
Accepted: 10 Feb 2015

Published online: 06 May 2016 *

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