一种减少供应链牛鞭效应的资产组合管理方法

Reducing bullwhip effect in supply chain: A portfolio management approach

考虑一个由单个供应商和多个零售商组成的供应链系统,零售商面临无促销活动和有促销活动两种动态需求环境,采用周期性检查库存策略,基于当前市场需求信息向供应商订货.同时,市场中的零售商由于订货决策行为的相互影响而存在一定的相关性.本文探讨零售商之间具有不同相关性订货决策时,运用资产组合管理方法调整零售商之间的供应量,减少订货的总方差,实现减少订货所产生牛鞭效应.随后,通过对比分析零售商订货量调整前后库存水平、库存成本、缺货损失和利润,验证了零售商调整订货量的动机和积极性.数值算例的结果表明,运用资产组合管理方法能够减少供应商的总方差,同时能够激励具有不同相关系数的零售商调整订货量,在一定程度上减少供应链中的牛鞭效应.零售商之间的相关系数越大,供应链中牛鞭效应减少的效果就越显著;且在同一相关系数下,零售商对市场需求预测的方差越大,运用资产组合管理方法所达到的牛鞭效应减少的效果就越大.

In the supply chain system comprising of one supplier and several retailers, retailers are likely to face two kinds of market demand in a dynamic environment： demand under no sales promotion and demand under sales promotion. In this situation, we assume that the retailers adopt the order-up-to level policy to play orders from suppliers according to the information of market demand. On the other hand, the retailers in the same market may take each other＇ s order-decision behavior into account. In this article, we discuss the down-stream suppliers＇ decisions of ordering from upstream suppliers when retailers have different correlations. Furthermore, we investigate the retailers leveraging the portfolio management approach from securities investment theory to adjust the retailers＇ quantity of ordering which can reduce the total variance of ordering to suppliers and the bullwhip effect. And we investigate the retailers＇ motivation on order adjustment by analyzing and comparing inventory cost, loss of out of stock and profit which the inventory level before and after order adjustment. Our numerical findings show that portfolio management approach can help to reduce the total variance of ordering to the supplier. Also, this method can reduce the bullwhip effect in the supply chain to some extent when multiple retailers have different correlation coefficients of the decision-making behavior in the same market. The greater the correlation coefficient among the retailers is, the more significant the effect on eliminating the bullwhip effect in supply chain will be. Moreover, at the same correlation coefficient, the greater the variance of the market demand forecasted by the retailers, the greater the effect on reducing the bullwhip effect is with the application of the portfolio management approach.