Exploring the Different Information Sharing Scenarios in the Supply Chain by Simulation

As knowledge is power, information is power in supply chains. It (information) provides the decision maker the power to get ahead of the competition, the power to run a business smoothly and efficiently, and the power to succeed in an ever more complex environment. Information plays a key role in the management of the supply chain. But how the different combination of information sharing based on Information flow can affects the performance is not yet understood. In this study, information sharing scenarios is designed to analyze supply chain performance through a simulation model. We identify the most efficient scenario and estimate the each efficiency of information-sharing scenarios.Results show that two-way information sharing acts much more efficient than other scenarios and Demand information sharing is more efficient than Supply information sharing. In the end, using the factorial experiment design, the impact of demand process parameters on the profit of information sharing was explored, and it showed that the correlation coefficient between the demand in this period and prior periods, have the most positive impact on the profit from the two-way information sharing. Vice versa, the variance of error term in the demand process has the most negative impact on the profit.