Title: A system dynamic approach to study the behaviour of serial supply chain under uncertain environment

Authors: Sanjita Jaipuria; Siba Sankar Mahapatra

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, 769008, India ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, 769008, India

Abstract: In order to gain a competitive edge, currently it is being emphasised to improve the performance of the whole supply chain instead of individual entities within it. However, uncertainties allied along the supply chain causes an adverse effect on performance measures such as the bullwhip effect (BWE) and total cost leading to decrease in the service level and profitability of an organisation. Therefore, in this work, a four level serial supply chain employed with (s, S) replenishment policy is modelled though a system dynamics approach to mimic the behaviour of the supply chain. Performance measures of the system are estimated under the influence of stochastic variation of lead time and demand through simulations approach. The effect of ordering decision parameter (e.g., target inventory) on supply chain performance has been studied under the above uncertainties. A design of experiment (DOE) approach has been implemented to generate the experimental scenarios and study the influence of individual and interaction effect of system parameters on performance. Best parametric combination that simultaneously optimises two performance measures such as BWE and total cost has been reported.

Keywords: supply chain performance; system dynamics; design of experiments; DOE; grey relational analysis; GRA; bullwhip effect; BWE; serial supply chains; uncertain environments; uncertainty; supply chain management; SCM; replenishment policy; modelling; simulation; ordering decisions; target inventory; total cost.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSOM.2016.076504

International Journal of Services and Operations Management, 2016 Vol.24 No.2, pp.208 - 234

Received: 17 Sep 2014
Accepted: 08 Nov 2014
Published online: 11 May 2016 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article