A study on evaluation of demand information-sharing methods in supply chain

With the increasing globalization, there are many sources of uncertainty across the entire high-tech electronics equipment supply chain. These include demand uncertainty and supply uncertainty due to the use of unskilled labor, as well as the sudden breakdown of production facilities of upstream players. These cause many problems, including excess inventory and poor service, to name but two. Information sharing is a very important tool in dealing with these sort of problems because it helps to eradicate potential uncertainties related to various corporate behaviors. Although there has been much research on this subject since the 1990s, there have not been sufficient efforts to identify the control characteristics, or the responsiveness of various information-sharing methods. Our objective here is to clarify the control characteristics of information-sharing methods closely related to the supply chain community strategy. In this study, we evaluate the supply chain performance of two different types of information-sharing methods. One is the planned demand transferring method (PDTM), and the other is the forecasted demand distributing method (FDDM). We analyze supply chain performance for both methods in terms of throughput, inventory level, and service level. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.