In current research literature, supply chain management (SCM) is a hot topic
breaching the boundaries of many academic disciplines. SCM-related work can be
found in the relevant literature for many disciplines. Supply chain management can be
defined as effectively and efficiently managing the flows (information, financial and
physical) in all stages of the supply chain to add value to end customers and gain profit
for all firms in the chain. Supply chains involve multiple partners with the common goal
to satisfy customer demand at a profit.
While supply chains are not new, the way academics and practitioners view the
need for and the means to manage these chains is relatively new. Very little literature
can be found on designing supply chains from the ground up or what dimensions of
supply chain management should be considered when designing a supply chain.
Additionally, we have found that very few tools exist to help during the design phase of
a supply chain. Moreover, very few tools exist that allow for comparing supply chain
designs.
We contribute to the current literature by determining which supply chain
management dimensions should be considered during the design process. We employ
text mining to create a supply chain design conceptual model and compare this model to existing supply chain models and reference frameworks. We continue to contribute to
the current SCM literature by applying a creative application of concepts and results in
the field of Stochastic Processes to build a custom simulator capable of comparing
different supply chain designs and providing insights into how the different designs
affect the supply chain’s total inventory cost. The simulator provides a mechanism for
testing when real-time demand information is more beneficial than using first-come,
first-serve (FCFS) order processing when the distributional form of lead-time demand is
derived from the supply chain operating characteristics instead of using the assumption
that lead-time demand distributions are known. We find that in many instances FCFS
out-performs the use of real-time information in providing the lowest total inventory
cost.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2758 |
| Date | 15 May 2009 |
| Creators | Brann, Jeremy Matthew |
| Contributors | Arreola-Risa, Antonio |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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