Vim Case Study The Vm Game

As Disney and Towill (2002) argue, moving to a VMI scenario alters the fundamental structure of the supply chain ordering. But details of this transformation are not clear. In order to measure the impact of different Information and Communication Technologies on supply chain dynamics, Disney et al.(2002) have implemented VMI (and other scenarios) in the Beer Game. The debriefing of the game clearly underlines the player’s difficulty to implement the VMI concept and they need for clarification.

In the literature, three main types of contribution can be found: general, case studies and models.

General papers give a general definition of the VMI and the main benefits of its application. Industrial case studies delimit the scope of the VMI application,

For a given article, figures in percentage associated to a particular expression represent the frequency of apparition of this expression in proportion to the totality of the expressions used in this article. Globally, all authors introduce the VMI with general terms, which belong to the concept family. The process terms are used in a majority of papers, but are less developed. The cooperation and technology sides are treated in case studies. Modeling papers broach the cooperative process, but each author develops a particular way to build the cooperative process. To conclude, the overview of the literature underlines that a general consensus exists around the concept and the main expectations associated to the VMI. However, authors make their own interpretation of the integration of the cooperative process. Although the VMI was introduced for the first time in 80´s of the twentieth century, the first research dated to the beginning of nineties. But already in the year 1985 (Silver & Peterson, 1985) provided the first formulation and discussion of simple two-echelon inventory systems. (Svoronos & Zipkin, 1991) evaluated the performance of arborescent inventory/distribution systems. This system has the independent Poisson demand at the lowest echelon and assuming stochastic transit times, one for one replenishment

They focused on coordination task of three fundamentals stages of supply chain (procurement, production and distribution). In the area of operational planning they were interested in buyer-vendor coordination, production distribution coordination and inventory-distribution coordination with strategic planning and advance in communication and information technology (Erenguc, et al., 1999) joined the integration between production and transport. (Archetti, et al., 2005), implicated approach Vendor Managed Inventory in stochastic demand.It was noted that VMI is illustrated in most models with content relationship of one supplier and one customer or retailer. Nevertheless, in reality there exist models with many suppliers, distributors, manufacturers, wholesalers that are in many deals with retailers and customers. (Darwish & Odah, 2008) designed the model with one supplier and more customers with penalized over the level of inventories and found the corresponding cost function. Contractual relationships are incorporated in the model and then the authors propose an algorithm for this model, which reduces the complexity of the model and looking for KKT point (Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions are necessary for the solution in nonlinear programming to be optimal, provided that some regularity are satisfied) related to the cost function. (Zhanga, 2008) designed integration Vendor managed