هماهنگی زنجیره تامین با سیاست تخفیف کمیتی

This paper develops a model for illustrating how to use quantity discount policy to achieve supply chain coordination. A supplier–buyer system selling one type of product with multi-period and probabilistic customer demand is considered. We first show that if both the buyer and supplier can find a coordination mechanism to make joint decisions, the joint profit in this situation is more than the sum of their profits in the decentralized decision situation. We then show that quantity discount policy is a way that may be implemented to achieve coordination. Our results illustrate that there is a bound of quantity discount in which both sides can accept and the increased profit due to joint decision can be measured using this bound. We finally design a method to divide it between the buyer and supplier, and the optimal quantity discount policy is obtained by using this profit sharing method.

One of the main issues of supply chain management is to find suitable mechanisms to coordinate the supplier–buyer relationship in order to achieve overall maximal profit. Traditional relationships between all parties in supply chains are the ‘‘trade-off relationship’’, so the pricing problem must be the most sensitive factor among the relationships. Traditionally, many researches are taken from the viewpoint that a pricing problem can only benefit one party (that is, the party who is dominant in the chain). But if the two parties coordinate with each other, they may probably find out some pricing strategies so that both parties can improve their own performance. The purpose of this paper is to model a supply chain with one supplier and one buyer and to find a suitable way to achieve coordination. To achieve coordination, the decision policy characterized by the unit selling price and the order quantity is often coordinated through the mechanism of quantity discounts. That is, the supplier often induces thebuyer to accept the coordination by quantity discounts. Therefore, research on quantity discounts becomes an ever-increasing important field in supply chain management. In our research, we try to build up a quantity discount model to present a quantitative analysis, and then prove the above standpoint. What’s more, we may get some revelatory conclusions to help companies frame feasible pricing strategies. Quantity discounts have been studied traditionally for a long period from the viewpoints of marketing and operation, respectively. Works in the marketing literature mainly analyze the function of quantity discounts on enlarging companies’ sales, while works on operation area focus on the effect of quantity discounts on reducing companies’ operating cost, such as ordering cost and inventory cost. In this paper, we try to integrate the above two viewpoints in one single framework. Besides, most of the former researches generally assume that the demand rate is constant or price-sensitive to simplify the problem, and few consider the case when the demand is uncertain, which is exactly considered in our model. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In the following section, we provide a brief review of related research and discuss the role of quantity discounts in supply chain coordination. In Section 3, we outline the model assumption and establish the basic model to illustrate the optimal strategies in traditional supply chain relationships. In Section 4, we give the necessary conditions to implement a quantity discount polity under decentralized decision system, and identify the bound of discount rate. In Section 5, we discuss how to establish and realize the coordination mechanism. Finally in Section 6, we conclude and discuss future research.

In this paper, we extend the quantity discount model with constant demand and no shortage cost to a new one with probabilistic demand and shortage cost allowed. The purpose of our model is to use quantity discount policy to achieve supply chain coordination. Our analysis shows that coordination and joint decision can improve the performance of the entire supply chain. We calculate the increased profit in this situation and design an implementation method to divide it between the buyer and the supplier, so that both of them can improve their own profits beyond those in the traditional business relationship.