Fractal-based Collaborative Supply Chain Management Model for Reconfiguration: Production Planning and Inventory Management

Abstract

Supply chain management (SCM) is one of the most important issues in improving enterprises’ financial performance. In the 1990s, most of the research endeavours have focused on static and centralized supply chains because past business processes were simple and static. In recent global market places, however, conventional SCM models are not suitable, because there are many risks and dynamics such as supply disruptions, international regulations, ever changing demand, short product lifecycle and a technology transfer issue in supply chain management. Recent trends emphasize flexible and collaborative SCM to manage the risks and dynamics of the global market place. A flexible and collaborative SCM model has capability to autonomously reconfigure the supply chain and share information and resources in order to better respond to the risks and dynamics. While many strategies for managing the risks and dynamics have been proposed, it still remains unclear how to apply the strategies to a supply chain and how to reconfigure the supply chain. In most case, small and medium enterprises are not considered during the collaborations because of the complicated interactions between large numbers of enterprises. Therefore, it is necessary to develop practical working mechanisms of reconfiguration considering collaborations of small and medium enterprises in operational perspective.The objective of this research is to build a framework of flexible and collaborative SCM. The specific objectives are as follows: 1) to formulate the reference architecture for flexible and collaborative SCM model, referred to as fractal-based collaborative supply chain management (c-fSCM), 2) to propose the reconfiguration mechanism of supply chain configuration, 3) to propose the collaborative production planning and scheduling mechanism based on the goal model of fractal, and 4) to demonstrate operational perspectives of the proposed working mechanisms and validate.