TY - JOUR

T1 - Reduction of the value of information sharing as demand becomes strongly auto-correlated

AU - Babai, M. Zied

AU - Boylan, John Edward

AU - Syntetos, A. A.

AU - Ali, M. M.

N1 - This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in International Journal of Production Economics. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in International Journal of Production Economics, 181, Part A, 2016 DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpe.2015.05.005

PY - 2016/11

Y1 - 2016/11

N2 - Information sharing has been identified in the academic literature, as one of the most important levers to mitigate the bullwhip effect in supply chains. A highly-cited article on the bullwhip effect has claimed that the percentage inventory reduction resulting from information sharing in a two level supply chain, when the downstream demand is autoregressive of order one, is an increasing function of the autoregressive parameter of the demand. In this paper we show that this is true only for a certain range of the autoregressive parameter and there is a maximum value beyond which the bullwhip ratio at the upstream stage is reduced and the percentage inventory reduction resulting from information sharing decreases towards zero. We also show that this maximum value of the autoregressive parameter can be as high as 0.7 which represents a common value that may be encountered in many practical contexts. This means that large benefits of information sharing cannot be assumed for those Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) with highly positively auto-correlated demand. Instead, equally careful analysis is needed for these items as for those SKUs with less strongly auto-correlated demand.

AB - Information sharing has been identified in the academic literature, as one of the most important levers to mitigate the bullwhip effect in supply chains. A highly-cited article on the bullwhip effect has claimed that the percentage inventory reduction resulting from information sharing in a two level supply chain, when the downstream demand is autoregressive of order one, is an increasing function of the autoregressive parameter of the demand. In this paper we show that this is true only for a certain range of the autoregressive parameter and there is a maximum value beyond which the bullwhip ratio at the upstream stage is reduced and the percentage inventory reduction resulting from information sharing decreases towards zero. We also show that this maximum value of the autoregressive parameter can be as high as 0.7 which represents a common value that may be encountered in many practical contexts. This means that large benefits of information sharing cannot be assumed for those Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) with highly positively auto-correlated demand. Instead, equally careful analysis is needed for these items as for those SKUs with less strongly auto-correlated demand.

KW - Supply chain

KW - Bullwhip effect

KW - Information sharing

KW - Autoregressive demand

U2 - 10.1016/j.ijpe.2015.05.005

DO - 10.1016/j.ijpe.2015.05.005

M3 - Journal article

VL - 181

SP - 130

EP - 135

JO - International Journal of Production Economics

JF - International Journal of Production Economics

SN - 0925-5273

IS - Part A

ER -