A strategic quick response approach for dynamic supply chain management of perishable goods

Owing to the fast growth of Internet technology, enterprises are facing crucial challenges from both competitors and consumers in the global market. In order to get survived, forming strategic supply chain alliances and utilizing the Internet technology to establish a quick response (QR) system (also called the efficient customer response (ECR) system) become as the common practice for enterprises in terms of cost reduction and efficiency improvement. This paper first presents an Internet-based QR framework for a perishable goods supply chain alliance. Secondly, with the aim of optimizing the expected QR alliance profit, a dynamic frequency-based supply and distribution (DF-SD) algorithm is developed under the constraints of short food freshness period, limited distribution centre capacity, contract violation penalty, and uncertain supply rate. The DF-SD algorithm is composed of a linear programming (LP) model and an extended genetic algorithm (GA) to generate the optimal supply and distribution strategy for all members in the perishable goods supply chain. Simulation results show that the proposed QR approach successfully outperforms the traditional fixed-frequency approach in terms of both the solution quality as well as computation time efficiency.