Enhancing the Supply Chain Performance by Integrating Simulated and Physical Agents into Organizational Information Systems

As the business environment gets more complicated, organizations must be able to respond to the business changes and adjust themselves quickly to gain their competition advantages. In our prior research (Lin and Lin, 2004), a novel framework was proposed, which integrates simulated and physical agents to provide an efficient way for organizations to meet the challenges in forming dynamic business processes to manage supply chains. In the integrated framework, physical agents coordinate with inter-organizations’ physical agents to form workable business processes whereas simulated agents model and analyze the what-if scenarios to support physical agents in making decisions. This paper uses a DSC (digital still camera) supply chain as an example to demonstrate and evaluate how and the degree of the integrated framework affect supply chain performance. The results show its benefits on reducing bullwhip effects in frequently changing supply chain environments.