Abstract The firm‐level bullwhip effect is the amplification of demand uncertainty along a supply chain—that is, fluctuations in production (for manufacturing firms) or purchases from suppliers retailers wholesalers) firm tend to be greater than its fluctuations. We predict that ratio (a proxy for effect) amplifies relation between and cost structure. expect this amplifying because determines e...

Supply Chain Management is a critically important approach toward producing and delivering goods and services in a cost-effective, timely manner. However, many SCM systems in practice exhibit the bullwhip effect, a tendency towards increasing variability in demand as this type of information migrates downwards in the producing supply chain. We argue that one can reduce the size of the bullwhip ...

Nowadays, effective and competitive company operation can be achieved through incorporating the concept of supply chain operation into company management. Inventory control, as a critical part of the supply chain management, becomes the second most frequent application area for simulation technique in logistics (after manufacturing). The dynamics of supply chain operation is characterised by th...

The study addresses the impact of flexibility on the bullwhip effect, i.e. the increase of demand variability moving upstream along the SC. With this aim, a three stages SC is investigated, where producers/suppliers/retailers are connected by appropriate inventories. A reorder quantity ROQ (constant time interval) as stock policy has been adopted. The analysis takes into consideration two extre...

We consider a series of companies in a supply chain, each of which orders from its immediate upstream members. Usually, the retailer’s orders do not coincide with the actual retail sales, as the retailer tries to ”outguess” the coming actual demand from the market. Similarly, the wholesaler’s orders to the producer do not coincide with the actual demand of the retailers. The bullwhip effect ref...

This paper considers an inventory setting in which the historical data used for demand forecasting is delayed. When the replenishment is controlled via an order-up-to policy, we show that such delays reduce the variability of the order history and dampen the bullwhip effect. We discuss the intuition behind this result. (Key Terms: Information delay; Forecasting; Supply Chain Management; Bullwhi...

An important observation in supply chain management, popularly known as the bullwhip effect, suggests that demand variability increases as one moves up the supply chain. Empirical evidence suggests that the orders placed by a retailer tend to be much more variable than the customer demand seen by that retailer. This increase in variability propagates up the supply chain, distorting the pattern ...

This paper addresses the problem of increasing order variances in multi-tier supply chains. The majority of current approaches for reducing this problem, namely the bullwhip effect, rely on information sharing and/or cooperative planning in inter-organizational systems. Due to multiple barriers in implementing these approaches, we maintain the local autonomy of the participants in the supply ch...