Supply chain management (SCM) is defined as a set of approaches utilized to efficiently integrate suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and retailers to make sure that merchandise is produced and distributed at the right quantities, to the right locations, and at the right time, in order to minimize system-wide costs while satisfying customer requirements. As a long-term cooperation strategy a...

This paper examines the beneficial impact of information sharing in multi-echelon supply chains. We compare a traditional supply chain, in which only the first stage in the chain observes end consumer demand and upstream stages have to base their forecasts on incoming orders, with an information enriched supply chain where customer demand data (e.g. EPOS data) is shared throughout the chain. Tw...

We study the bullwhip and inventory variance problem in a single echelon of a supply chain with arbitrary lead-times. We assume three different classes of demand; uncorrelated white noise demand, autoregressive (AR) demand and autoregressive moving average (ARMA) demand. We use conditional expectation to generate minimum mean square error forecasts of demand to use in the Order-Up-To (OUT) repl...

This paper develops a new simulation method for vendor managed inventory (VMI) model based on fuzzy arithmetic in the supply chain (SC). The traditional VMI model has been successfully used to reduce the ‘‘Bullwhip Effect” in the SC. Thus, in real industry the VMI model can be observed that some variables/ parameters may belong to the uncertain factors. Therefore, the traditional VMI model may ...