Design for customer responsiveness: Decision support system for push-pull supply chains with multiple demand fulfillment points

摘要

A push-pull supply chain is a hybrid of "push" and "pull" supply chains where semi-finished products are produced by forecasts and "pushed" to a stock point, then are "pulled" by actual customer orders and go through remaining processes to be delivered. In order to design an effective push-pull supply chain, there are two critical issues in the decision making process: how to support decision makers to identify feasible locations for demand fulfillment points based on the product, process, and organizational form of a given enterprise, and how to support decision makers to improve the customer lead time management capability of a push-pull supply chain. In this study, we present a decision support system for designing a push-pull supply chain that 1) incorporates the product, process, and organizational form of a given enterprise; 2) leverages a new hybrid push-pull control model, which enhances the customer lead time management capability; and 3) provides a decision support model that supports decision makers for performing scenario-based analysis in designing a push-pull supply chain. The numerical analysis exhibits how the proposed system can be implemented in the context of a semiconductor supply chain, and subsequently shows that our control model results in substantial improvement of customer lead time management capability over conventional push-pull supply chain designs without a significant inventory cost increase. Also, some experimental results are provided to support decision makers on how to make the transition from the conventional design to the proposed one.