List of Publications by Department for the Academic Year A Supplier Strategy to Control the Bullwhip Effect
Abstract
Strategies to control the Bullwhip effect in supply chains have been the focus of substantial amount of research in the last few decades. Some strategies were based on the implementation of information sharing and collaboration with retailers. Other strategies suggested the use of the vendor-managed inventory approach. Recently, a new type of strategies suggested the supplier’s control on the replenishment of orders received from a pool of retailers with replenishment quantity decisions that can decrease the effect of the bullwhip phenomenon to the supplier. However, this strategy leads to preference discriminations among the retailers. This paper proposes a similar strategy that controls the fulfillment quantities but to individual retailer’s orders, independently of other retailers. This strategy is capable to conserve the expected mean of the retailer’s orders while reducing their expected variance. The main contribution here is to reduce the impact of the bullwhip effect on the supplier side by controlling the fulfilled quantities to the retailers. Surprisingly, this proposed strategy eventually improves the service level on the retailer side.
Author(s)
Akram Amin El Tannir