International audienceThis research explores the effect of information transparency and cooperation among the front nodes of supply chains. Although published works in the supply chain (SC) domain underline the need for information transparency and cooperation for competitiveness of firms, the majority among these are conceptual or empirical. As such, the domain requires fresh effort towards analytical and simulation based research for validation. In the present work, simulation is used as the research methodology. The simulation platform is developed in ARENA®, which is based on simulation language SIMAN. It has the capability to model multi-product, multi-echelon supply chains. Cooperation is depicted in the form of demand pooling and accelerated delivery of consignments from cooperating SC nodes, when stock-out contingency occurs at a particular node. The modelling also explores the effects of full, partial and zero level of information transparency on the SC performance. The simulation results suggest that these initiatives improve SC service time performance. It is also observed that more advantages from cooperation and information transparency are obtainable when the SC is leaner. The studies also highlight that such SC initiative that motivates local optimisation at the nodes is counter-productive to SC wide performance
Agility can be viewed as a need to encourage the enterprise-wide integration of flexible and core competent resources so as to offer value-added product and services in a volatile competitive environment. Since flexibility is considered a property that provides change capabilities of different enterprise-wide resources and processes in time and cost dimensions, supply chain flexibility can be considered a composite state to enterprise-wide resources to meet agility needs. Enterprise modeling frameworks depicting these composite flexibility states are difficult to model because of the complex and tacit interrelationship among system parameters and also because agility thrives on many business objectives. In view of this, the modeling framework presented in this paper is based on analytical network process (ANP) since this methodology can accommodate the complex and tacit interrelationship among factors affecting enterprise agility. The modeling framework forms a three-level network with the goal of attaining agility from the perspective of market, product, and customer as the actors. The goal depends on substrategies that address the characteristics of the three actors. Each of these substrategies further depends on manufacturing, logistic, sourcing, and information technology (IT) flexibility elements of the enterprise supply chain (SC).
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