انتقال موجودی و ریسک های تامین به زیر مجموعه صنعت و عموم مردم با ابزارهای مالی

We consider a two-stage newsvendor model of a sub-industry in which suppliers have short lead-time capacity to produce goods for retailers that are selling non-identical products. We argue that the inventory and supply risks of the newsvendors due to demand uncertainty can be pooled and shared among different supply chains by treating reserved capacity as commodities and trading them as futures and options on futures to hedge the risks. The risks will be further shared with and transferred to the public if speculators are allowed to play the game. We show that this new mechanism of combining operational and financial risk hedging strategies offers industries a new way to more efficiently meet demand and improve profit.

The management of the newsvendor's inventory and supply risks due to demand uncertainty is a fundamental issue in the inventory literature. The problem is particularly important for items with significant demand volatility, and large inventory and lost sales costs such as fashions, seasonal products, and fancy electronic devices. Frazier (1986) estimates that the inventory carrying cost, shortage, and excess supply for the U.S. apparel industry is 25% of the annual retail sales. In fact, for fashions items, lost sales alone can be as high as 18–20% of the total inventory (Hunter et al., 1996 and Mattila et al., 2002). Therefore, it is worthwhile to devise a better strategy for the industry to minimize the costs that arise from demand uncertainty. Jain and Silver (1995) introduce the postponement strategy that permits “newsvendor-type” retailers to use reserved capacity options to replenish short life-cycle inventory during the selling season. Their single-period two-stage model provides an opportunity for a retailer to correct its inventory position according to updated forecast so that the problem of supply–demand mismatch can be alleviated when the option of placing additional orders is available. The strategy is favorable to the retailer because it can adjust its inventory level during the selling season to better match demand. However, it might erode the supplier's profit because part of the mismatch risk is shifted along the single supply chain from downstream to upstream (Donohue, 2000). In this paper we argue that the inventory and supply risks can be pooled and shared among different supply chains, and they can also be transferred to the public via futures and options on futures, provided that suppliers' short lead-time capacities allow retailers to replenish in the season. We treat such reserved capacity as a commodity and refer to it as super capacity. We propose that super capacity can be decoupled from its physical goods and can have its own market price to reflect its value because retailers can hold it as an alternative form of inventory in order to reduce the cost of mismatch between supply and demand. Therefore, the super capacity market allows different suppliers in a sub-industry to pool their capacities to reduce demand variability. We define a sub-industry as a group of retailers and suppliers that sell products that are produced by similar facilities and capabilities within the cluster. For example, the women's fashion skirt market is basically divided into the woven and knitted skirt sub-industries according to the materials used in the products ( Joseph, 1986). A woven skirt supplier can make different styles and colors of woven products to fulfill the orders from different customers. However, they cannot make knitted skirts because woven fabrics and knitted fabrics require different machinery and know-hows for garment production. Consequently, the appeal market can be divided into several sub-industries. Therefore, retailers can exchange their residual super capacities after realization of demand in the selling season. Thus the imbalance between aggregate demand and aggregate supply within a sub-industry is improved and the mismatch cost of the sub-industry is mitigated.

We emphasize that super capacity can be decoupled from physical inventory to become an independent commodity and has its own market price. Our results indicate that this new market-based risk transfer mechanism combines operational and financial hedging strategies, which offers industries a new way of meeting demand more efficiently to improve profit. Nevertheless, the increase in unit cost of inventory that is paid for acquiring super capacity will in fact augment the overall payoff of retailers because the mismatch cost will be mitigated. The super capacity price will become a tool to allocate the saving of the mismatch cost among different players to maximize the players' payoffs. The analytical results in this paper underline the usefulness to managers for decision making on coping with demand volatility. The study advocates that retailers might co-operate with their competitors to pool their reserved capacity together for trading. Our propositions suggest that an individual retailer will benefit from the super capacity game if it suffers from poor sales revenue in a good business year of the sub-industry because it can sell the residual capacity at a better price. In fact, managers do not need to avoid or exclude speculators from the game because we confirm that the demand uncertainty risk can be transferred to outsiders and individual benefits will not be affected by the behaviors of other participants. Moreover this study also proves that suppliers shorten their production lead-time and sell their super capacity to the futures market to gain more benefits. In future studies, additional work could be done on the minimum size of the sub-industry that has an effective market price for super capacity such that a failure of the super capacity exchange mechanism in the starting period due to insufficient players in the game may be prevented. Moreover, the optimal size of coalition for trading residual capacity in stage 2 could be investigated to maximize the profits of the hedgers.