Item-level information visibility: An application of RFID.

摘要

Being able to reveal product information at the item-level in a way that is fully automatic, instantaneous, and touchless, radio frequency identification (RFID) is emerging as the hottest information tracing technology in supply chain management. While industry practitioners and academic literature argue that RFID brings value by reducing labor cost, increasing sales, decreasing inventory cost, accelerating physical flow, and improves quality control, they are mostly based on case studies, acknowledging the fact that everything works out well because information visibility eliminates uncertainty. This dissertation investigates the beneficial properties and business applications of item-level information visibility in three different perspective from extant literature review: (1) value of item-level information, (2) knowledge based item-level Manufacturing and (3) item-level information sharing in oligopoly. In the first part, we model the benefits of item-level visibility as the result of reduced randomness, and as a function of the scale of the information system, the distribution of the sample space(s), the control variables and the production functions. This static model is extended for multiple period, which is simulated to verify the generality and robustness of the model. In the second part, we introduce an innovative concept of item-level manufacturing that is backed up by a knowledge-based adaptive learning system. We quantify the potential benefit of such manufacturing scheme. In the third part, we consider a homogeneous product market and the incentive for oligopolists to reveal item-level product information with their customers, by modeling it as a two-stage game. With a constant clearance discount rate, we derive pure strategy equilibria that are subgame perfect and demonstrate that complete information sharing is the unique Nash equilibrium of the game when the common demand is volatile and that no information revelation is the unique Nash equilibria when demand is not volatile. We show that the Nash equilibria is the same with a decreasing clearance discount rate and that neither complete information revelation nor zero information revelation is consistent with an equilibrium with an increasing discount rate. Results are similar in a duopoly non-homogeneous product market scenario.