Description

Firms are facing intense competition in today's global business environment. They have to produce quality products at competitive prices with unpredictable demand and has to quickly respond to risks as well as opportunities. All these require an efficient supply chain and a well-designed distribution system. Information Technology is becoming a critical enabler of an efficient supply chain management system, which can help in sharing and utilizing the information efficiently. Thus, there is a need to study the significance of available information within supply chain in decision-making process. We have studied the impact of electronic linkage between supply chain partners on the performance of distribution systems through case studies of two firms. These firms have implemented Web-applications for performing some business operations and are in the process to automate few more operations. These case studies have helped us to formulate models for optimal replenishment decisions. A multi-product, multi-constraint single-period distribution model has been formulated to solve a problem. This problem being NP-hard, a multi-stage heuristic method has been developed to solve the model.