مزایای استفاده از مدل های کسب و کار ترکیبی در یک زنجیره تامین

Today's competition between supply chains (SC) requires optimized strategies in order to satisfy customers’ demands. The business models used by the SC members play a big role in this delivery of value to the customer. From here the notion that a mismatch between the intended market and the business model used to address it translates into a poor SC performance. As real-life business environments have become really complex, SC members have been forced to use hybrid business models (that is, the integration of features of two different business models). A review of the literature in the area of supply chain management shows that past research have not paid much attention to this issue. The objective of this paper is to quantitatively evaluate the influence these hybrid business models have on the SC performance. For this purpose, a system dynamics (SD) simulation model is developed and tested under different operational conditions, so conclusions can be derived regarding the benefits of the use of hybrid business models.

Today's competition among manufacturing enterprises is fought between supply chains (SCs) (Ismail and Sharifi, 2006). In this scenario, competitiveness becomes something holistic (Duclos et al., 2000), as the satisfaction of the end customer is determined by the effectiveness and efficiency of the SC as a whole (Terzi and Cavalieri, 2004). This goal of ‘operating as a whole’ is the result of the degree of interaction between the members of the SC, which depends on the type of business models used by them (Ngai and Gunasekaran, 2005), i.e. engineer-to-order (ETO), make-to-order (MTO), assembly-to-order (ATO), make-to-stock (MTS), etc. According to Li and O’Brien, 1999 and Li and O’Brien, 2001 a poor SC performance can be attributed to a mismatch between the intended market and the business model used to address it. As the market changes from being sales- to being market-oriented (Vonderembse et al., 2006), an adequate response requires shifting between business models (Olhager, 2003). Due to the fact that this last is not a trivial task, in real-life business environments SC have been forced to use hybrid business models. Sen et al. (2004) classifies these hybrid business models as serial/horizontal (companies within the SC adopt either business models A or B, in series), or parallel/vertical (companies within the SC adopt business models A and B, in parallel and in some proportion). Next section reviews the literature in the area of hybrid business models. In Section 3, a quantitative model is developed focusing in the case of parallel/vertical integration of the MTO and MTS business models. In Section 4, the quantitative model is tested under different operational conditions in order to evaluate the influence of hybrid business models on the performance of the SC. Finally, Section 5 presents conclusions and future research.

Supply chain members have opted to use hybrid business models in order to respond to changes in the customers’ demands (and be able to compete in today's market). The objective of this paper was to quantitatively evaluate the influence these hybrid business models have on the performance of the supply chain. The SD simulation model built tested different scenarios in order to collect statistical total response time and total backlog. Our first finding is that there is a trade off between total response time and total backlog: the MTO-based portion of the supply chain allows shorter response time values (so MTO-oriented hybrid business models should be preferred in the event of high lead time uncertainty); the MTS-based portion of the supply chain causes the total backlog values to increase (so MTS-oriented hybrid business models should be preferred in the event of low demand uncertainty). As a conclusion we can say that the operation of the SC (as a whole) is greatly impacted by the individual configuration decisions (i.e. degree of hybrid business model used) of the SC partners, and that a proper combination of MTO- and MTS-based SC partners allows the achievement of balanced results in both SC performance criteria. This research effort acknowledges that several elements need to be incorporated into the SD simulation model in order to be considered a realistic one. For this reason, future research will address the balance between global (whole SC) and individual benefits (SC partners); the SC performance at the chain level and the operations level; the impact of varying the level of product standardization and process flexibility of each SC partner; the impact of demand distortion from SC partner to SC partner; the impact of different lead time ratios among SC partners, and finally, a simulation-by-optimization approach (that is, finding out values of the decision variables which optimize a quantitative objective function under constraints).