I am a huge fan of Open Access in research and a while ago I was made aware of a book on supply chain management, which has recently been published under an open access license. The full book can be downloaded on the web site of the publisher.
I already reviewed some articles by Denis Towill primarily because he does some interesting research on simulation and supply chains, but also because I like his clear style in his articles.
In one of his early papers (1992) he teamed up with Naim and Wikner and described state of the art strategies to fight the bullwhip effect or as it is called in the paper by its older name: Industrial Dynamics.
There are many obstacles to information sharing in a supply chain. Confidentiality is probably one of the biggest issues, but there are others not so obvious like antitrust regulations, the timeliness and accuracy of the provided information, differing technologies between the supply chain partners or a mismatch in the alignment of incentives. Therefore trust and cooperation become critical ingredients in a supply chain partnership.
How to shrink the “Uncertainty Circle” is the topic of a paper I read today. It has been written by Rachel Mason-Jones and Denis R. Towill and can be downloaded here free of charge.
The bullwhip effect in supply chains has been around for some time now. The term “bullwhip effect” originated at Procter & Gamble, and is defined as: demand amplification across echelons within a supply chain. This describes the effect that end customer demand may be very static (as for “Pampers” by Procter & Gamble), but the demand experienced by the manufacturer or supplier shows amplified demand variations. (Fransoo and Wouters (2000))
