The Roles of Distributor in the Supply Chain–Push-pull boundary

T W Ng,William Chung

doi:10.5539/ijbm.v3n7p28

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to study the roles of the distributor in the supply chain and to explore its positive contributions. We find that the distributor should act as a push and pull boundary (also called decoupling point) of the supply chain. The definition of decoupling point is needed to be enhanced when the concept of the decoupling point is applied to an industry, like the electronics industry, due to the fact that several decoupling points along a supply chain are possible. The distributor, as a decoupling point, needs to resolve the overstock risk pooled from the upstream parties due to the economies of scale in the production process. On the other hand, the distributor needs to provide fast delivery service with small order quantities and to satisfy the high availability requirement from its downstream parties by providing postponement services to her partners in the supply chain.

Highlights

While competition exists on the organizations and on the supply chains, organizations are seldom worked alone and will form a lot of strategic partners or align with their suppliers so as to empower synergy
Since we study a distributor in a supply chain for an industry, we modify these five decoupling points for an industry as follows
This paper discusses the positive contributions of distributors to a supply chain in an industry

Summary

Introduction

While competition exists on the organizations and on the supply chains, organizations are seldom worked alone and will form a lot of strategic partners or align with their suppliers so as to empower synergy They will focus on their core competency and outsource the other business process or form partnership with each other. The performance of the supply chain is determined by the achievement of the collaboration of every party: “not until the last customer is paying satisfactory, every organization in the supply chain is not earning profit.”. With this understanding, every organization in the supply chain has to move out all the obstacles between them and find out a win-win scenario which emphasis a partnership relationship. How to improve manufacturer-retailer relationships becomes a hot topic since Kumar (1996)

Objectives

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion