Arborescent Supply Chains: the effect of OUT policies

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of the smoothing replenishment rules on a divergent supply chain. To this purpose we simulate a classical four echelon serially- linked supply chain model and an arborescent supply chain model under two scenarios, i.e. classical OUT and smoothing replenishment rule. We show that the divergent supply chain structure always performs worse than the serial supply chain and how smoothing the order pattern may decrease this discrepancy.