A Study on the Value of Shared Real-time Stock Information in Two-Echelon Distribution Supply Chains

2계층 분배형 공급사슬에서 실시간 공유 재고 정보의 가치에 관한 연구

Due to the improvement of modern information technologies, sharing stock information among the supply chain members is a common practice nowadays. Many companies are planning to adopt the information systems to possess the real-time shared stock information. Thus, it is needed to quantify the value of shared stock information. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the value of the shared stock information for two-echelon distribution systems. Existing reorder policies can be classified into installation stock policies and echelon stock policies. Since installation stock policies do not utilize the shared stock information, and both classes of policies may show poor performances for distribution systems, we cannot evaluate the value of the shared stock information with the existing policies. Thus, we provide a new type of reorder policy, named order risk policy. We define the order risk using marginal analysis, and prove the optimality. Through computational experiment that compares the order risk policy with the existing policies, it is shown that a significant cost reduction is achieved with the effective utilization of the shared stock information. We also show the effect of the system characteristics on the value of the shared stock information.