The paper describes main features of a strategy for managing complexity of the global market and realtime scheduling multi-agent system designed for the LEGO Company. The design is based on Multi-Agent Technology Group (MATech) own strategy blueprint and multi-agent platform, which provide real-time adaptive event-driven scheduling to replenish products to LEGO Branded Retail stores. The protot...

The rapid change of the product life cycle is making the parameters of the supply chain models more and more uncertain. Therefore, we consider the coordination mechanisms between one manufacturer and one retailer in a fuzzy decision marking environment, where the parameters of the models can be forecasted and expressed as the triangular fuzzy variables. The centralized decision-making system, t...

Supply Chain Management (SCM) is one of the most important concepts, which focuses on customer requirement and sets Core Company in the centre, integrating the suppliers, distributors and customers as a whole. Integration is the trend and advantage of SCM. It is necessary for the retail industry to introduce the concepts and methods of SC Integration Management. Through close cooperation and sy...

We study competition and coordination in a supply chain in which a single supplier both operates a direct channel and sells its product through multiple differentiated retailers competing in quantities. We study analytically the supply chain with symmetric retailers and find that the supplier generally prefers to have as many retailers as possible in the market, even if the retailers’ equilibri...

In a three stage supply chain composed of one manufacturer, one distributor and one retailer, the supply chain coordination mechanism is studied under a fuzzy demand environment. The market demand is treated as a positive trapezoidal fuzzy number, and the models of centralized decision-making system and spanning revenue sharing (SRS) contract are proposed by the method of the fuzzy set theory. ...

In the last decade, supply chain management has changed its focus, centring now on value creation, by taking into consideration the recent trends of partners integration and implementation of internet technologies. Within this context, this paper presents measurable results regarding the business value of supply chain collaboration practices enabled by e-commerce technologies. The presented res...

The paper compares the expected performance of a Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) supply chain with a traditional “serially-linked” supply chain. The emphasis of this investigation is the impact these two alternative structures have on the “Bullwhip Effect” generated in the supply chain. We pay particular attention to the manufacturer’s production ordering activities via a simulation model based ...

Retail organizations works on thin margins and hence it is very imperative that they utilize information technology to achieve optimization on time and space in the entire retail supply chain in order to remain competitive. Web services is an emerging technology holding tremendous promise as a platform neutral, easy to implement mechanism to achieve information and business process integration ...

We explore in this paper the performance of sales rebate contracts in fashion supply chains. We conduct both analytical and numerical analyses via a mean-variance framework with reference to real empirical data. To be specific, we evaluate the expected profits and variance of profits risk of the fashion supply chains, fashion retailers, and manufacturers under 1 the currently implemented sales ...