Comparative evaluation of supply chain management strategies: a simulation approach

Supply chain management has become one of the most important sources of competitive advantage in different industries. For years, researchers have investigated the various processes within supply chain. There has been an increasing attention placed on performance, design and analysis of supply chain. However, the supply chain is a complex model so it is difficult to analyze the performance of a supply chain philosophically. To evaluate the control mechanism for a supply chain, simulation is one of the effective methods. There are five common supply chain models built up in this paper. From the simulation results, various performance measures such as transportation cost, resources utilization, inventory level, and order cycle time can be calculated.