Amir (Aboulfazl) Keramati

ABSTRACT

Supply chain management is an integration philosophy to manage the total flow of goods and service, information and finance between the suppliers and the customers. The goal is to meet the needs of the final consumers by supplying the right product at the right place, time and price. Companies use the supply chain as a way to meet this goal in today’s business environment [9]. On the management of the supply chain, it is evident that there exists a complex and unpredictable situation to which managing products and services on various levels require the integration of different parts of the chain as pre-condition that is still largely missing [1-5-15-17]. Firms have responded to these uncertainties in different ways. The traditional way of coping with uncertainties (i.e. quality variation, supplier unreliability, unpredictable customer demand in each stage of the supply chain and etc.) has been building inventories or providing excess capacity that is costly and inefficient. In addition, even the improvement in individual organisations does not necessarily contribute to the improvement of the whole supply chain. That is important because competition between individual organizations is being replaced by the competition between supply chains [4-8-11-12-17]. The integration requires certain co-ordination among partners in a supply chain that should be translated into process and function integration within and along the entire supply chains [2-7]. A number of authors claim that an integrated supply chain as a must [and not an option] is a fundamental incentive for organisations’ enthusiasm that stem from the belief partnering companies will be able to create a new capability which they would otherwise not be able to create separately [11-12-13]. However, as Roh [16] claims only a few companies have embarked on integrating their supply chains while most of them have focused on single elements of a chain such as inventory or planning and so on [3-6-10-14]. Therefore, an effective integration implementation still remains a mystery for many companies [5].

Though the impact of a poor plan on the overall business is detrimental, simulation models have enabled managers to make better planning decisions, comparison of various operational alternatives without interrupting the real system. Bearing this in mind, this paper has aim to present a supply chain modelling taxonomy that is often lacking in literature; To develop a simulation model for decision makers for predict and visualise the effects of their decisions on different components of a chain in a sharable and scalable format. Finally, to inform supply managers about a potential approach that can be implemented in their integration process.