Habiba Ahsan 09U0372 BBA-IV, Section: F

Modeling Supply Chain Dynamics: A Multi-agent Approach Jayashankar M. Swaminathan Stephen F. Smith and Norman M. Sadeh

A supply chain can be defined as a network of autonomous or semiautonomous business entities collectively responsible for procurement, manufacturing and distribution activities associated with one or more families of related products. Performance of any entity in a supply chain depends on the performance of others, and their willingness and ability to coordinate activities within the supply chain. Supply chain reengineering efforts have the potential to impact performance in a big way. It is essential to understand important issues (decision trade-off) and common processes in different types of supply chains to develop a generic, modular, and reusable framework. There are a number of processes that are common to supply chains. The study identified these processes and developed a library of software components for modeling them. The library consists of two main categories-structural elements and control elements. Using the approach, supply chain models are composed from software components that represent types of supply chain agents (e.g.. retailers, manufacturers, transporters), their constituent control elements (e.g., inventory policy), and their interaction protocols (e.g., message types). The information of supply chain modeling components has been derived from analysis of several different supply chains. The article provides a reusable base of domain-specific primitives that enables rapid development of customized decision support tools.
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Modeling agility of supply chain Ashish Agarwal Ravi Shankar M.K. Tiwari
Agility is the fundamental characteristic of a supply chain needed for survival in turbulent and volatile markets, which are Supply chain management (SCM) helps firms in integrating their business by collaborating with other value chain partners to meet the unpredictable demand of the end user. An integrated supply chain or seamless supply engineered to cope with uncertainty can profitably satisfy customer demand, while nonintegrated manufacturing processes, non-integrated distribution processes and poor relationships with suppliers and customers are the recipes of business failure for trading firms. In the era of time-based competition, supply chain must have ability to meet the demands of customers for ever-shorter delivery times and to synchronize supply during the peaks and troughs of the demand. becoming norms as product life cycles shorten and environmental forces create additional uncertainty resulting in higher risk in the supply chain management. Agility further helps in providing the right product, at the right time to the consumer, which is the main objective of any supply chain. In the present paper, using interpretive structural modeling, interrelationships of the variables, influencing supply chain agility, have been derived. These variables have been categorized according to their driving power and dependence. This methodology provides a means by which order can be imposed on the complexity of such variables. The insight from model would help supply chain managers in strategic planning for improving supply chain agility.

The Agile Supply Chain Competing in Volatile Markets Martin Christopher

To be truly agile, a supply chain must possess a number of distinguishing characteristics. The agile supply chain is market sensitive. Market sensitive means that the supply chain is capable of reading and responding to real demand. Most organizations are forecast-driven rather than demand-driven. In other words, because they have little direct feed-forward from the marketplace by way of data on actual customer requirements, they are forced to make forecasts based on past sales or shipments, and convert these forecasts into inventory. The use of information technology to share data between buyers and suppliers is, in effect, creating a virtual supply chain. Virtual supply chains are information based rather than inventory-based. Marketing management has not traditionally recognized the importance of logistics and SCM as a key element in gaining advantage in the marketplace. However, in todays more challenging business environment, where volatility and unpredictable demand have become the norm, it is essential that the importance of agility be recognized. Leading companies are already implementing marketing strategies that are underpinned by a supply chain strategy designed with agility in mind. These are the organizations that will be best equipped for survival in the uncertain markets of the twenty-first century.