Dynamic Supply Chain Strategy

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In the today's dynamic business environment, successful supply chain partners are those who have comprehensive and robust strategies by which they can appropriately respond to an uncertain environment. Inherent uncertainties and various risks in the economic environment of a supply chain network will have some considerable effects on different operations of the every supply chain. Therefore a robust supply chain strategy will ensure that supply chain activities of different stakeholders are aligned with business priorities and support customer promise. This paper aims at robust optimization of single-product for multi-echelon supply chain architecture consisting of production plants, distribution centers (DCs) and customer zones (CZs). The …show more content…

Outsourcing can truly be labeled as a key feature of today’s global economy (Gunasekaran and Kobu 2007). A supply chain is a dynamic, stochastic, and complex system that might involve hundreds of participants. It can be defined as a network of suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and retailers, who are collectively concerned with the conversion of raw materials into goods that can be delivered to the customer. Companies associated in the same network require efficient supply chain integration in order to optimize their collective performance (Khaji & Shafaei, 2010). Supply chains, as complex networks, are usually studied from different structural perspectives, such as dyadic, serial, divergent, convergent and network (Huang et al., 2003). The key issues in supply chain management can broadly be divided into three main categories: (i) supply chain design (ii) supply chain planning and (iii) supply chain control (Shankar, et al., …show more content…

To capture the structural dimension of the supply chain risks the literature classifies two types of upstream and downstream risks. Downstream risks usually relate to the fluctuations in demand, volatile market conditions, customer behavior, technological changes and shorter product life cycles. At one end these risks are associated with the physical distribution and product flow towards the downstream side and on the other hand they are related to forecasting issues. These risks are usually the outcome of a mismatch between actual demand and projected demand resulting in a demand and supply mismatch throughout the supply chain (Szwejczewski, et al., 2008). Lockamy III and McCormack classified supply chain risk sources into three categories: operational, network and external (Lockamy & McCormack, 2010). Any of the mentioned risks threat the overall performance of SCs and their profitability. As a result, SCs should be capable of predicting the risks and have the ability to deal with them. Therefore, risk management is an important concern of SCM. SC risks could be managed through designing a robust network and an efficient management of product flow throughout it (Farahani, et al., 2014). Some planning approaches aim at exploring the uncertainty inherent in a supply chain, and developing

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