Analysis of Decision Models in Supply Chain Management

Abstract

In today's scenario, supply chain processes have been greatly influencing businesses and trades globally. Customer needs are sought to be met reducing lead times thereby leading to enhanced delivery with quality standards and reasonable prices kept in mind. Demands from the customers may vary from time to time. Considering the historical as well as interpreted data and analyzing all factors involved, firms/organizations can forecast what the trade scenario in the future. This helps any organization in systemizing their products/services, managing inventories, warehousing arrangements. All this leads to positive growth for both suppliers and buyers in the long run. Supply chain management (SCM) has been the dominant research paradigm of the last few decades. Considerable efforts have been put forth in developing decision models for solving supply chain related problems.We focus our attention on these models and optimize them because they address the important aspects of SCM and illustrate different modeling approaches. This paper illustrates the existing SCM decision models and improves upon them, illustrate their applications in global SCM, and identify areas of competitive research in the future. In this paper, we focus on integrating decisions across the supply chain network from the decision models, which are: buyer-supplier relationships, supplier selection, market integrated distributions and market share. Buyer-Supplier relationships lead the basis for continued growth and more possible profit for the system. Choosing the right supplier for the demand requested has its merits and this can be seen periodically in the company's progress chart. To further minimize costs and delivery time, and maximize quality, an optimization tool is used to generate this data for validation with a case study. The paper also identifies potential areas of additional research where analytical modeling can generate useful insights.