عملکرد همکاری های زنجیره تامین - یک مطالعه شبیه سازی

In the past few decades several supply chain management initiatives such as Vendor Managed Inventory, Continuous Replenishment and Collaborative Planning Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR) have been proposed in literature to improve the performance of supply chains. But, identifying the benefits of collaboration is still a big challenge for many supply chains. Confusion around the optimum number of partners, investment in collaboration and duration of partnership are some of the barriers of healthy collaborative arrangements. To evolve competitive supply chain collaboration (SCC), all SC processes need to be assessed from time to time for evaluating the performance. In a growing field, performance measurement is highly indispensable in order to make continuous improvement; in a new field, it is equally important to check the performance to test conduciveness of SCC. In this research, collaborative performance measurement will act as a testing tool to identify conducive environment to collaborate, by the way of pinpointing areas requiring improvements before initializing collaboration. We use actual industrial data and simulation to help managerial decision-making on the number of collaborating partners, the level of investments and the involvement in supply chain processes. This approach will help the supply chains to obtain maximum benefit of collaborative relationships. The use of simulation for understanding the performance of SCC is relatively a new approach and this can be used by companies that are interested in collaboration without having to invest a huge sum of money in establishing the actual collaboration.

Supply chain management (SCM) organizes and manages the whole process of activities of supply network from suppliers through manufacturers, retailers/wholesales till end users (Christopher, 1998). Traditionally, supply chain (SC) was designed with more focus on movement of materials rather than information flow. Due to ever increasing competition in businesses, many SCs have taken some twists from traditional way of functioning, from time to time, to adapt to the situation. Existing literature describes the SCM of the 21st century as an integrative value adding process of planning and controlling of materials and information between the supplier and the end user in order to increase customer satisfaction by reduced cost and improved services (Cooper, Lamber, & Pagh, 1997). In today’s competitive unpredicted business world, cost reduction and good customer services are not stand-alone effort of any single SC member. As success of any product lies in customers’ response to that product, it is important for businesses to achieve customer satisfaction by having efficient and effective SCs. This may be possible through collaboration among SC partners. Hence, it is important to coordinate SC activities to streamline planning, production and replenishment (Ramanathan, 2013). Market demand and changing nature of end-users can create more opportunities for SC players. At the same time, to be viable in a competitive market, all SC members need to be innovative and productive (Lee, 2002). As operating alone in a tight competition seem to be no longer beneficial for SCs, the importance of partnership has been adopted in various stages of many SCs (Smaros, 2007). In the past, several SCM practices such as Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI), Efficient Consumer Response (ECR), Continuous Replenishment (CR), and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) have been suggested in the literature to increase benefits of SCs. VMI technique was developed in the mid 1980’s, in which customer’s inventory policy and replenishment process were managed by the manufacturer or supplier. However, SC visibility was not predominately powerful in VMI to avoid bullwhip effect (Barratt & Oliveira, 2001). Forecast driven VMI and integration of CR with EDI was used to reduce the information distortion in VMI. ECR developed in 1992, was based on the concept of value adding by all partners in the supply chain. Both VMI and EDI together with ECR tried to create more responsive supply chain with broader visibility of information across the whole SC. Ever increasing SC demands have led to the invention of Collaborative Planning Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR), another supply chain management tool incorporating planning, forecasting and replenishment under a single framework (Fliedner, 2003). CPFR, a second generation ECR (Seifert, 2003) aims to be responsive to consumer demand. It was introduced as a pilot project between Wal-Mart and Warner-Lambert in mid-nineties. According to VICS (2002), CPFR is a new collaborative business perspective that combines the intelligence of multiple trading partners in the planning and fulfilment of customers demand by linking sales and marketing best practices. Collaboration among SC members is a topic of interest for many researchers and practitioners (Barratt and Oliveira, 2001, Danese, 2007, Nyaga et al., 2010 and Ramanathan, 2013). Simatupang and Sridharan (2004) evolved four profiles for supply chain collaboration (SCC), namely efficient, synergistic, underrating and prospective collaboration. They proposed decision synchronization, incentive alignment and information sharing as three performance indices. In an attempt to maximize benefits of SCs, all SC members share information (data sharing) and collectively forecast the demand for products to have effective replenishment process (Aviv, 2007 and Gavirneni et al., 1999). SCC activities help to improve the performance of involved members in a structured framework with the aim of maximizing profit through improved logistical services (Stank, Keller, & Daugherty, 2001). However, majority of the articles in the literature have not highlighted important factors of good SCC practice. In this paper, we will be analysing the environments conducive to initiate SCC such as CPFR. The focus of this research is to identify the suitable environments to collaborate in SCs. Revealing the actual benefits of SC collaboration with certain number of partners with specific level of investments for a specified period will help to make decision on implementing SCC at various levels. This is further explained through evidence from the existing literature in the next section. The rest of the paper is organised as follows: Section 2 will briefly explain the existing literature on SCC. Section 3 will describe research methodology used in this research. Section 4 explains the development of performance measurement of supply chain collaboration. Section 5 will discuss the results and analysis of simulation. Finally, Section 6 will conclude the paper with key findings, managerial implications, limitations and future work.