The impact of freight transport capacity limitations on supply chain dynamics

We investigate how capacity limitations in the transportation system affect the dynamic behaviour of supply chains. We are interested in the more recently defined, 'backlash' effect. Using a system dynamics simulation approach, we replicate the well-known Beer Game supply chain for different transport capacity management scenarios. The results indicate that transport capacity limitations negatively impact on inventory and backlog costs, although there is a positive impact on the 'backlash' effect. We show that it is possible for both backlog and inventory to simultaneous occur, a situation which does not arise with the uncapacitated scenario. A vertical collaborative approach to transport provision is able to overcome such a trade-off. © 2013 Taylor & Francis

The impact of the supply chain structure on bullwhip effect

The aim of this paper is to study how the structural factors of supply chain networks, (i.e. the number of echelons, the number of nodes and the distribution of links) impact on its dynamics performance (i.e. bullwhip effect). To do so, we systematically model multiple structures according to a robust design of experiments and simulate such structures under two different market demand scenarios. The former emulates a stationary condition of the market, while the latter reproduce the extreme volatility and impetuous alteration of the market produced by the current economic recession. Results contribute to the scientific debate on supply chain dynamics by showing how the advocated number of echelons is not the only structural factor that exacerbates the bullwhip effect. In particular, under a sudden shock in market demand, the number of nodes and the divergence of the supply chain network affect the supply chain performance.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad DPI2013-44461-P/DP

OVAP: A strategy to implement partial information sharing among supply chain retailers

This paper analyses the impact on supply chain performance of adopting different strategies to implement partial information sharing among heterogeneous retailers. Supply chains are modelled using a multi-agent systems approach. We find that the strategy adopted to construct the partial information sharing structure (i.e., the retailers who share information) has a significant impact on supply chain performance. We propose a practical strategy, named Order VAriance Prioritization (OVAP), which gives priority to the retailers with higher order variance. OVAP outperforms the worst (i.e. naive) implementation method by 27.2% and 7.8% with respect to the levels of bullwhip and average inventory.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación DPI201680750P